I don’t, you realize, feel God’s presence like I used to. What’s mistaken with me?”
“I’m undecided if I actually even consider in Jesus. Can I?”
“My Christian highschool never taught me about racism in America. What do I do with what I’m learning? How can I ever return to that form of Christianity again? Should I?”
I’m privileged to take a seat with Christian young people as they ask questions like these—questions on identity and development, change and growth. Who am I becoming? they need to know. And how is that related to who I’ve been until now?
That interrogation is at the center of Inside Out 2, the smash-hit sequel of the summer. Pixar fans first met 11-year-old Riley in Inside Out (2015), when Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger, and Disgust worked together to assist her navigate a recent middle school.
Now, Riley is about to start out highschool, trying to seek out her way onto the hockey team and thru the complexities of puberty. Her adolescence introduces the five original emotions to recent and disruptive company: Embarrassment, Envy, Ennui, and—most notably—Anxiety.
Anxiety plays a sophisticated role in our lives—paralyzing on the one hand and prudential on the opposite. Oriented toward the long run, it helps us discover negative outcomes and work to make them less likely. Anxiety keeps us off ledges; anxiety prevents us from taking selfies with bears.
With Anxiety on the helm, we see Riley somewhat successfully navigate through the perils of adolescent life. She makes recent, older friends by guessing on the sorts of things highschool girls discuss, even risking a conversation with the hockey captain, Val, to make up for a rocky start with another teammates.
But Inside Out 2 also makes it clear that anxiety—even “successful” anxiety—comes at a value. Riley ruminates frantically about what others might consider her, how things could go mistaken athletically and socially. She develops an “intolerance of uncertainty”; she sees danger where it doesn’t exist, tormented because she will be able to’t fully know what her teammates and coaches consider her. In one particularly anxious sequence, she imagines she’ll be so bad that she’s laughed off the team; a minute later, she worries she’ll actually be too good and her teammates shall be jealous. Desperate for some objective knowledge of where she stands, she betrays her values by sneaking a peek on the coach’s private notebook.
As Anxiety works ever more frantically to navigate Riley through stressful situations, the opposite emotions realize something crucial: Anxiety, too, is just trying her best. They stop their winner-take-all battle and as a substitute help Anxiety find her place in Riley’s complex emotional life. Anxiety’s positive contributions can belong without allowing compulsive desperation to take over.
Many anxious young evangelicals, including among the students I work with, struggle to integrate their anxiety this successfully. Most of them understand that it isn’t a sin to experience anxiety; they know therapy, biblical counseling, and drugs can all be useful when their worries get out of hand. But what exactly is the connection between our anxiety and our Christian faith? If we’re encouraged to “not be anxious about anything” (Phil. 4:6), how can our anxiety be anything but problematic?
That “don’t be anxious” verse is familiar. Less familiar is Paul’s use of the identical Greek word (merinma) in 2 Corinthians 11:28, writing about his “every day pressure due to my anxiety for all of the churches” (NRSV). Paul lumps this anxiety in with many other difficulties—imprisonment, shipwreck, hunger, thirst, danger—that he faced in his apostolic role, all braved out of a compassion for the churches he planted and a craving to see them flourish.
Merinma can be sometimes translated as care. Paul uses it in 1 Corinthians 12:25 to speak in regards to the kind of “care” or “concern” that church members must have for each other throughout the body of Christ. When we care about others’ well-being, we remember just how fragile and precious they’re; sometimes, naturally, we feel anxious for them.
I don’t want the Christian young adults I work with to be calm to the purpose of complacency. I would like them to care about serving Jesus: I would like them to ask hard questions on what they have gotten and what they consider. I would like them to understand the gravity of the responsibility that comes with being created within the image of God and charged with stewarding the world. I would like them to know that their actions could make their neighbors’ lives higher, or worse.
But I also want them to experience this “anxiety” about vocation and mission and living for the Lord within the context of the gospel’s certainty. I would like them to rest in God’s love for all people and for every of them. I would like them to be anxious about nothing in Paul’s positive sense, knowing they ultimately can entrust their striving to the one who cares essentially the most of all, casting their concerns upon him through a lifetime of humble prayer (1 Pet. 5:6–7).
In Inside Out 2, we see not only the symptoms of Riley’s anxiety—the sleepless nights, the racing heart—however the healthy longings that her anxiety conceals and distorts. Riley desires to be grown up. She desires to be loved and revered. She desires to contribute, to be a part of a team, and to be good and recognized nearly as good.
Just so with my students, whose anxiety often reveals a lot in regards to the people they’re. Anxiety about grades reveals a desire to learn and grow. Anxiety about parents’ acceptance reveals an appreciation for a way their families have blessed them. Anxiety about our online culture is a recognition of the facility and potential of social media. Underneath our anxious fear that every part will crumble is a craving for all things recent.
In Curtis Chang’s The Anxiety Opportunity, he observes that Jesus recurrently encountered anxious people within the Gospels: He listened to widows and touched lepers, meeting people where they were as a substitute of encouraging them to sidestep their feelings or calm down. Jesus loved these anxious selves, understanding that their agitation, appropriate or otherwise, was normal to feel within the very situations that drove people to seek out him.
When we see our anxious selves with the grace with which Jesus sees us, anxiety takes its rightful, subservient place in our Christian lives. Then we will begin to work for the world Jesus loves a lot.
J. Michael Jordan is Associate Professor of Theology at Houghton University, where he served as Dean of the Chapel from 2013-2024. He is the writer of Worship in an Age of Anxiety: How Churches Can Create Space for Healing.
