In the days following the student massacre at Virginia Tech, Olivia felt enveloped by free-floating anxiety. She would sleep fitfully, waking up with periodic worries that someone would open fire in the subway or in her office. Lying awake in the middle of the night, she would tell herself that God was still on His throne and that she could entrust her life to Him. But still she stared into the darkness for hours.
 
Unlike Olivia’s event-driven anxiety, Liz has always wrestled with worry. She freely labels herself a perfectionist, seemingly unaware of the link between her driven, performance-based lifestyle and the chronic anxiety that keeps her stomach in knots and invades her dreams at night. In particularly stressful situations, she finds herself tempted to return to the anorexia of her adolescence—food being the one thing she feels she can control without interference.
 
Both women are believing Christians, active in their churches and faithful in their personal devotions. But in each of their lives there are pockets of unbelief, which seeps out as anxiety. Neither would immediately see the root of their concerns as unbelief, but if they—and we—are willing to examine Scripture, we will see our Lord’s clear diagnosis: “O you of little faith!” (Matthew 6:30).
 
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:19-30, emphasis mine)