Bola had let go of her son’s hand for no more than a moment. It was a Saturday morning in Oyingbo market, the week before school resumed, and she was bent over a pile of school sandals, turning each pair over to check the stitching while the trader named prices she had no intention of paying. Her four-year-old had been standing at her hip, holding a fistful of her wrapper. When she straightened up with a pair in each hand, he was gone.
He had not gone far. A man selling balloons had walked past, and the boy had followed the bright colours three stalls down and round a corner, past the woman frying puff-puff and into the narrow lane where the fabric sellers hang their bales from the roof beams. There he stopped, turned round, and saw nothing he recognised. Every face belonged to a stranger. Every voice was too loud. The balloons had vanished.
What followed lasted perhaps four minutes, although Bola said afterwards it felt like an hour. The boy began to cry, quietly at first and then with his whole body, a high and frantic wail that cut straight through the noise of the lane. A trader offered him a sweet. He would not take it. Somebody asked him his name, and he could not get the word out. He was not hungry, not hurt and not in any real danger. A dozen kind adults were within arm’s reach. None of that helped, because the one thing his small heart needed to know had gone missing: where is my mother?
Bola heard the cry before she saw him. She told me she would have known that voice in a football stadium. She pushed through the lane, dropped to her knees on the dusty ground, and he flung himself at her neck so hard that they both nearly toppled over.
I have thought about that scene many times since she told me about it. The child’s panic was real, and in one sense it was telling the truth. Something had gone wrong. He had lost sight of his mother. But his panic was also telling him something false. It said he was alone, and he was not. His mother had never stopped being his mother. She was three stalls away, already moving toward the sound of his voice.
Anxiety often behaves like that in the life of a believer. It tells part of the truth and then adds a lie to it. And if we learn to read it rightly, it can become a signal that we have lost sight of the Father and need to turn back toward Him.
The second burden
Most believers know that Scripture tells us to cast our cares on God. Many of us have done it, sincerely, on our knees. And then the care comes back. The school fees are still due at the end of the month. The scan results are still a week away. The thoughts return at the bus stop, in the middle of a meeting, at two in the morning. And with them comes a new accusation: if you had really trusted God, you would not still be worried.
That accusation lays a second burden on top of the first. You were anxious about your child, your job or your health. Now you are also anxious about your anxiety, afraid that the worry itself has made you displeasing to God. You begin to hide it. You stop mentioning it in prayer, because every mention feels like a confession of failure. And so the very thing that should drive you toward the Father begins to keep you away from Him.
I want to offer you a different way of reading what happens inside you. Think of anxiety as a signal, the way the boy’s cry in the market was a signal. It is information. It tells you that something in your heart has drifted into living as though you had no Father, as though everything depended on you, as though no one were coming. The right response to that signal is neither shame nor denial. It is return.
Let me be careful here, because careless teaching on this subject has hurt many people. I am not saying that every anxious feeling is caused by a failure to understand your identity in Christ. Our bodies are part of the picture. Hormones, exhaustion, illness, grief, trauma and the chemistry of the brain all play a part, and some people live with anxiety disorders that need medical treatment and skilled counselling. Receiving that help is not a lack of faith. A believer with a broken leg goes to the hospital and thanks God for the doctor. A believer with persistent panic attacks may need to do the same. What I am describing in this teaching is the spiritual dimension that runs through all our anxieties, whatever else may be contributing to them: the pull to live as an orphan when the Father is near.
PunchlineAnxiety is a signal, not a verdict. It tells you that your heart has begun living as though you had no Father, and it calls you to return.
“Your heavenly Father knoweth”
The most extended teaching Jesus ever gave on anxiety comes in the Sermon on the Mount. Many of His listeners were Galilean peasants and fishermen for whom the next meal was a genuine question. Jesus was not addressing comfortable people with imaginary problems. He named food, drink and clothing, the most basic needs of human life, and then He said this:
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Look at how Jesus builds His argument. He does not tell His hearers that their needs are unimportant, or that a spiritual person should rise above such things. He says the opposite: “your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things” (Matthew 6:32). The needs are real. The Father knows them. The whole argument rests on who He is.
That word Father is the key to the chapter. In the King James text of Matthew 6, it appears twelve times. Jesus speaks of the Father who sees in secret, the Father who knows what you need before you ask Him, the Father to whom we pray, the Father who forgives, the Father who feeds the birds of the air. By the time He reaches the subject of anxiety, He has spent the whole chapter surrounding His disciples with the Father’s presence. The instruction “take no thought” grows out of that soil.
Now notice the comparison He makes. “For after all these things do the Gentiles seek.” In that setting, the Gentiles were the nations who did not know the God of Israel. Their religious world was crowded with deities who had to be fed, flattered and appeased, gods who were unpredictable at best and hostile at worst. Nobody in that world prayed “Our Father” with any confidence. So of course they were anxious. They had every reason to be. Anxious striving after food and clothing was the natural behaviour of people who believed they were on their own.
Jesus is saying to His disciples: that is not your situation. When a child of God lies awake running through every possible disaster, he has begun, without realising it, to think like someone with no Father. The anxiety is a signal that he has wandered into the orphan’s way of seeing the world.
It helps to know what the phrase “take no thought” meant in 1611. We might hear it as a command to stop planning, but that is not how the translators used it. In their English, “thought” could mean anxious care. When the young Saul was searching for his father’s donkeys, he said to his servant, “let us return; lest my father leave caring for the asses, and take thought for us” (1 Samuel 9:5). He meant that his father would start to worry. The Greek word behind “take no thought” in Matthew 6 is merimnaō, to be anxious or distracted with care. Its family of words appears in other familiar places. Jesus said to Martha, “thou art careful and troubled about many things” (Luke 10:41). Paul wrote “Be careful for nothing” (Philippians 4:6). Peter wrote “Casting all your care upon him” (1 Peter 5:7). Careful, care, take thought: in each case the same family of words describes the distracted, divided heart.
So Jesus is not forbidding foresight. Elsewhere He praises the builder who “sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost” (Luke 14:28). Preparation asks what can responsibly be done today. Anxiety tries to live through tomorrow’s trouble before tomorrow has arrived. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34). Each day comes with its own portion of difficulty, and the Father gives grace in daily portions to match it.
And then comes the direction for the heart: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness.” The anxious mind seeks provision first and hopes to find room for God afterwards. Jesus reverses the order. Seek the Father’s rule and the Father’s righteousness, and let Him be responsible for adding what His children need.
Casting care is an act of humility
Peter gives us the best known instruction on this subject, and its setting is worth noticing. He was writing to believers scattered across Asia Minor, people who were suffering for their faith and were “in heaviness through manifold temptations” (1 Peter 1:6). In the verses just before our passage, he has been speaking about humility among the leaders and members of the church. Then he writes:
Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time: Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.
In the Greek text, “casting” is a participle that hangs on the command before it. Peter is telling us how to humble ourselves under God’s mighty hand: by casting our care on Him.
That connection exposes something about anxiety that we rarely admit. Underneath much of our worry lies a quiet form of pride. I behave as though I am the one who must hold my life together. I keep the burden because, deep down, I am not sure anyone else will carry it properly. I would rather lie awake in control than sleep in dependence. The anxious believer is often a capable person who has never really learned to let his Father carry anything.
NuggetHumility says: I am a child. I was never designed to carry this alone. It takes the weight off my own shoulders and places it deliberately on His.
The verb Peter uses for casting appears in only one other place in the New Testament. When the disciples brought the colt to Jesus before His entry into Jerusalem, “they cast their garments upon the colt, and they set Jesus thereon” (Luke 19:35). It is a picture of a decisive, physical act. You take something off yourself and throw it onto something able to bear it. Casting care is a definite handing over, as definite as taking off your coat.
Then comes the reason: “for he careth for you.” Here Peter uses a different word. The care you cast is merimna, anxious concern. The care God has for you is expressed with a verb that means, very simply, it matters to Him. You are His concern. Your situation is on His heart. The reason for casting your care is His care. You do not have to wait until you have achieved a calm emotional state before He will pay attention. You come because He is already concerned.
The question asked in the boat
There is a moment in the Gospels where anxiety speaks out loud, and what it says is very revealing. Jesus had been teaching all day by the Sea of Galilee. In the evening He told His disciples to cross to the other side, and He fell asleep in the back of the boat. Mark tells us what happened next:
And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?
These were experienced fishermen. Several of them had worked that lake all their lives. They knew the difference between rough water and real danger, and when they said “we perish,” they meant it. The boat was filling with water. Their fear was not foolish.
But listen to what their fear turned into. “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” The storm had become an accusation against the heart of Jesus. Their anxiety had led them to a conclusion: He does not care about us. That is what anxiety does when it is left to speak for itself. It moves from this is dangerous to I am alone to nobody cares.
Jesus calmed the wind and the waves with a word. Then He asked them, “Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?” He was not scolding them for noticing that the boat was full of water. He was asking why their danger had led them to doubt Him. They had the Son of God asleep on a pillow in their boat. His peace was itself a message. The One who had told them they were going to the other side was not worried about reaching it.
Here is something beautiful. The word Mark uses for “carest” in that frightened question is the same word Peter would later use when he wrote “for he careth for you.” Peter was in that boat. He was one of the men shouting, Teacher, does it not matter to You that we are going under? Years later, after the cross, the resurrection and his own restoration, he wrote to suffering believers and gave them the answer that he had learned for himself. It matters to Him. He cares for you.
That is what it means to read anxiety as a signal. The fear in the boat was a sign that the disciples had lost sight of who was with them. The remedy they needed was a fresh look at Jesus.
The old fear calling you back
Paul uses a striking word when he describes the inner life of a child of God: “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear” (Romans 8:15). Notice the word again. Fear belongs to the old life. Before Christ, we lived under the shadow of condemnation, never sure of our standing, always exposed. Bondage and fear went together.
When anxiety rises in a believer, it often has the feel of that old house. It speaks the language of bondage: you must manage this alone, everything depends on you. The Spirit we have received speaks a different language. He is the Spirit of adoption, “whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”
So when you notice the signal, you have a choice about which voice to answer. You can keep listening to the old fear, rehearsing outcomes and calculating risks, or you can let the Spirit lead you into the cry of a child. The simplest prayer for an anxious believer is often just that one word: Father. Say it before you say anything else. Say it before you explain the problem. It reorients the whole heart. It is the boy in the market turning toward the one voice he knows.
This is why I speak of returning to sonship. You did not stop being a son when the anxiety began. Your standing in Christ did not change at two in the morning. The boy in Oyingbo market never stopped being Bola’s son. What changed was his awareness of her presence. Returning to sonship means returning to the awareness of what has always been true: you are in the Father’s family through Jesus Christ, and His care for you has not lapsed.
When the soul will not settle
Some of us have prayed and handed our cares to God, and still our feelings have not caught up with our faith. The psalms are honest about this. The writer of Psalm 42 is in deep distress. He is far from the house of God, his enemies taunt him, and his tears have been his meat day and night. Listen to how he speaks:
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. O my God, my soul is cast down within me: therefore will I remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the hill Mizar. Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.
He does not pretend. “My soul is cast down within me.” He describes waves and billows going over him, the language of a man who feels he is drowning. And yet, in the same breath, he speaks to his own soul. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? ... hope thou in God.” He does not wait for his emotions to agree before he directs them toward God. He talks to himself, instead of only listening to himself.
Then he says something that should comfort every believer whose care keeps returning: “therefore will I remember thee.” Remembering is an act of the will. You can choose to remember God’s faithfulness while your feelings are still disordered.
Notice too that this refrain appears three times across Psalms 42 and 43. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” He says it once, and then a few verses later the distress has returned and he has to say it again, and then again in the next psalm. Returning to God had become a pattern for him. The care came back, and he came back.
That should free you from the second burden. If your anxiety returns tomorrow, return to the Father tomorrow. Coming to Him again is not proof that your first prayer was insincere. It is what children do. A small child who has been reassured by his mother will run back to her a dozen times in an afternoon, and she does not conclude that he never trusted her at all. Each return is an act of dependence, and the Father receives every one.
There is a lesson here for the church as well. A frightened person should not have to choose between silence and a performance of confidence. If someone close to you is anxious, resist the urge to correct them with a single verse. Ask what is happening. Listen. Find out if there is a practical need you can meet. Sit with them. Sometimes a meal, a lift to the hospital or a patient phone call says “the Father cares for you” far more clearly than a sermon. And when the distress is persistent or is stopping someone from functioning, encourage them gently toward pastoral care and qualified professional help. That is part of how the Father’s care reaches His children.
A weaned child
One of the shortest psalms in the Bible offers one of the deepest pictures of a settled heart. David, a king with an entire nation’s affairs on his shoulders, wrote this:
LORD , my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever.
“Neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.” Here is a description of what the anxious mind does. It tries to manage things that are beyond its reach. It wants to settle the future, control other people’s decisions, guarantee outcomes that only God can guarantee. David says he has stopped doing that. He has not stopped caring about his responsibilities. He was still king. But he had stopped trying to carry what only God can carry.
Then he gives us the image: “as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.” Think about the difference between a nursing infant and a weaned child in their mother’s arms. A hungry baby is frantic. He cries, roots and struggles, because he wants something from his mother and he wants it now. A weaned child can sit in his mother’s lap quietly. He is no longer there only for what she can give him. He is there because she is his mother, and being with her is enough.
That is the posture anxiety pulls us out of and the posture we return to. Notice that David says “I have behaved and quieted myself.” This took some intention on his part. He calmed his own soul the way you might calm a restless child, by bringing it back again and again to where it belongs. Quietness did not simply descend on him. He chose it, in dependence on God.
Learning to read the signal
How, then, does this work on an ordinary Tuesday, when the bank alert has just come in and the balance is lower than you expected?
First, notice the signal and name it honestly. Tell the Father what you are actually afraid of. “Father, I am afraid this payment will not be met.” “Father, I do not know what the doctor is going to say.” “Father, I am frightened for my son.” Let the real need enter the prayer. You do not need to dress it up in language designed to make you sound less troubled than you are. Remember that you are casting the care onto Him, and you cannot hand over something you refuse to name.
Second, ask what belongs to you today. There may be a phone call to make, a form to fill in, an honest conversation to have, a person whose help you need. One small, responsible action is often worth more than another hour of rehearsing every possibility in your head. That action does not compete with trust. It is one of the ways trust behaves. A son works in his father’s house without believing that the whole house will fall down if he stops.
Third, look for one actual mercy. It does not have to be large. Somebody called. There is food for today. The pain is a little less this morning. Thanksgiving does not require you to pretend the whole situation is resolved. It simply trains your eyes to see evidence of the Father’s care while the need is still present.
Fourth, take care of the body God gave you. Sleep, food, fresh air and rest are not spiritual distractions. Elijah, after his great confrontation on Mount Carmel, sat under a juniper tree and asked to die. The first thing God gave him was not a rebuke but sleep and a meal, twice, before He spoke to him (1 Kings 19:4-8). Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do with a racing mind is go to bed.
And finally, if the anxiety is persistent, if it is disturbing your sleep night after night, affecting your work or your relationships, or coming with physical symptoms that frighten you, talk to someone. A pastor, a trusted friend, a doctor, a counsellor. Asking for help is an honest admission of the limits that God already knows about and has never despised.
When Bola finally stood up in the fabric lane with her son on her hip, his face was wet and his breath still came in little shudders. He held on to her neck with both arms as they walked back to the sandal stall. After a while, he said into her shoulder, “Mummy, I was calling you.”
“I know,” she said. “I heard you. I was already coming.”
She told me that sentence has stayed with her ever since, because she realised it was true of God before it was true of her. The boy had not needed to stop crying in order to be found. His cry was the very thing that led her to him. He did not have to calm himself down, explain himself properly or prove that he had been brave. He only had to call, and she came.
Perhaps you are standing in a crowded lane today. The faces are unfamiliar, the noise is too loud, and the thing you most need to know feels as though it has gone missing. Your anxiety is real, and it is telling you something true: you have lost sight of the Father. Do not let it tell you the lie that comes after, that you are alone and nobody cares. Let it do what a child’s cry is meant to do. Let it turn you toward His voice.
PunchlineYou are still His child. He has heard you. He was already coming.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What care in your life keeps returning after you have prayed about it? How have you interpreted its return?
- Where do you see the “second burden” in your own experience, the fear that your anxiety has made you unacceptable to God?
- Peter connects casting care with humility. What part of your life have you been reluctant to let the Father carry?
- The disciples’ fear turned into the question, “carest thou not?” What conclusions does your anxiety tend to draw about God?
- Who around you is anxious at the moment, and what would it look like to communicate the Father’s care to them in a practical way?
This Week
This week, whenever you notice anxiety rising, treat it as a signal and respond in three steps. First, say the word “Father” before anything else. Second, name to Him in one honest sentence exactly what you are afraid of. Third, ask what one responsible action belongs to you today, do it, and leave the rest with Him. Keep a short note of each time you return, without judging yourself for how often it happens. At the end of the week, read Psalm 131 aloud and thank God for every return.
A Prayer
Father, I come to You as Your child, with cares that keep coming back. Thank You that You know what I need before I ask, and that my life matters to You. I confess that I have often carried things You never asked me to carry, and that I have sometimes hidden my fear from You because I was ashamed of it. Today I cast my care on You. When the worry returns, teach me to return to You again, as many times as it takes. Quiet my soul like a weaned child with its mother. Give me wisdom for what belongs to me today, humility to receive help, and the settled assurance that I am never alone. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.