Anxiety and the Grace of God

When I first started reading the web comic Piled High and Deeper (PHD), I was amazed by how much it reflected my life as a PhD student. It was such a comfort to know that I wasn't alone!

This most recent comic particularly resonated with me. I have a tendency to be quite an anxious person. If I have a huge amount of work to do, I'm likely to stress about it to the point where I can't actually do any of it! I'll be absolutely exhausted, but I'll lie awake in bed stressing instead of sleeping. It's so incredibly frustrating. I know that the only way I'm going to get any of the work done at all is to get some sleep, but my mind just won't let me. It has to continue worrying! Very, very frustrating.

My struggles with anxiety are not as bad as they have been in the past, but as I'm coming to the end of my PhD, and the amount of work left seems too much for the amount of time left, I do stress out a bit. There are times when I just don't seem to have the energy to do any work at all, and that's very frustrating when I know (a) how much work I have to get done, and (b) how much I want to get this whole PhD thing over and done with! Sometimes it makes me wonder whether I am cut out for the academic life at all.

I've been reading through John Piper's excellent book Future Grace lately, and I've been greatly encouraged and challenged about my anxiety. (I was also challenged by a fantastic sermon at church last week, on Philippians 4, where the preacher said that we can't be constant pray-ers and constant worriers). Piper's book is about trusting the grace of God to come, not just living in the light of the grace that God has already shown us. Scattered through the book are chapters dealing with different "problems" that we all face, and showing how this idea of Future Grace helps us to deal with them. Fortunately for me, the first of these is anxiety!

Piper writes that the root cause of anxiety is unbelief in God's future grace. By this, he is not meaning to blame anxious people for their feelings, or make them feel even worse about what they are experiencing. Instead, he points out that knowing the fundamental cause of the anxiety can help us deal with it. One possible response he considers is the person who says "I have to deal with feelings of anxiety almost every day; and so I feel like my faith in God's grace must be totally inadequate. So I wonder if I can have any assurance of being saved at all." Piper responds with an awesome illustration:

Suppose you are in a car race and your enemy, who doesn't want you to finish the race, throws mud on your windshield. The fact that you temporarily lose sight of your goal and start to swerve, does not mean that you are going to quit the race. And it certainly doesn't mean that you are on the wrong race track. Otherwise the enemy wouldn't bother you at all. What it means is that you should turn on your windshield wipers and use your windshield washer.

When anxiety strikes and blurs our vision of God's glory and the greatness of the future that he plans for us, this does not mean that we are faithless, or that we will not make it to heaven. It means our faith is being attacked. At first blow, our belief in God's promises may sputter and swerve. But whether we stay on track and make it to the finish line depends on whether, by grace, we set in motion a process of resistance - whether we fight back against the unbelief of anxiety.

(John Piper, Future Grace, Multnomah, Oregon, 1995, pp. 55-56)

I know that John Piper is talking about assurance of salvation here, but I found this illustration encouraging with regard to my PhD. I've been working on my PhD for nearly 5 years, which is way too long, and my deadline of December 15 is looking dicey. However, the fact that I'm struggling with it doesn't necessarily mean that I shouldn't be doing it, or that I'm just not cut out for academic life. Maybe it does, but if that were the case, surely my supervisor would have picked up on that by now? After all, he's an intelligent man, and a widely-respected academic. If I was absolutely hopeless, he would not speak so highly of me, nor would he be so encouraging.

(This is connected with the so-called Impostor Syndrome, where you think that it's only a matter of time until people find out that you really have no idea what you're doing, and that you've just been fooling everyone into thinking that you're capable. Apparently this is very common among academics, but one of my supervisors once told me that it's the people who don't think that they are impostors who really are!)

So, where does all this leave me? I still struggle with anxiety and feelings of self-doubt, but I'm trying to put it all in God's hands and trust in his purposes. If finishing my PhD by December 15 is part of his plan for me, I believe that he will help me to accomplish this. If he has called me to serve him as an academic, he will help me get there in the end. That doesn't mean it will be easy, but "I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength."