A while back I listened to a sermon in which the speaker talked about casting all our cares on Jesus, as we are instructed to do in 1 Peter 5:6–7.
6 Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time:
7 Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.
I love that passage and agreed with the speaker that we should cast all our cares, all our worries, all our burdens, all our “stuff” on the Lord. It was interesting to me that God commanded this in the context of humbling ourselves “under the mighty hand of God,” as if it were a reminder that he is God and we are not, he is in control and we are not, he sees the big picture and we do not. In other words, when you have cares, you can’t fix them on your own, so the obvious answer is to cast them on the only one who can fix them—God. Why should we do this? What confidence do we have that he will do anything about them? “[F]or he careth for you.” Amen.
But also, notice that there is a colon at the end of verse 6. That means that what follows is kind of an elaboration on what precedes it. In other words, humble yourselves under his hand by casting all your care on him. You can’t be full of pride while begging God for help, right?
So there I sat, agreeing with everything the preacher spoke, right up until he said we should cast “all our panic.”
That did not sit well with me. Listen, I want very much to be obedient to God. I do not want to use my mental health struggles as an excuse to not be the person God wants me to be. I want to acknowledge all that has happened in my life while healing from it and I want to grow in grace. As I said in last week’s piece, I remind myself to always pass everything I hear or read through the filter of God’s word.
But still, there was this niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite as easy as the preacher made it sound.
So I brought up the topic with my therapist, who is also a Christian. I realize she is not a Bible scholar, but she has a good bit of knowledge about panic that I thought maybe she could help me apply and understand how these two concepts fit together.
Cares are worries about things in your life. If you don’t know how you’re going to pay the light bill, that’s a care. If you’ve been waiting two months for an appointment with a specialist and then you find out the day of the appointment that your insurance company neglected to approve the visit, that’s a care. If your dog is old and is about to die, that’s a care. Wondering if your husband is secretly looking at porn, having a wayward child or a bad sunburn, losing your flock of chickens to a raccoon—all cares.
Panic is not the same. Panic is not something we worry about (unless we have panic disorder, which is when we have panic attacks so much that we live in fear of when the next one will come). An actual panic attack is not something we dwell on in our thoughts or choose not to think about. It is not something we can cast because we don’t know when it is going to happen.
Panic is a physical reaction to a stimulus we may or may not be aware of. When the doctor hits your knee with a little rubber hammer and your leg jumps, that is 100% reaction. It is automatic, the way your body was created by God to react. We cannot choose as an act of our will to prevent the leg jumping. Our nervous system reacts to the impact of the hammer completely on its own, without our help. If you were blindfolded, your body would still react to the hammer as soon as it felt the impact. It wouldn’t matter if you were worried about it or not, whether you anticipated it or not. Your body would react to the stimulus. You could go to your doctor appointment all prayed up, having asked God to keep you from having the physical reaction, and your leg would still jump.
It’s the same with panic. When you suffer trauma, the circumstances surrounding the event are stored by your nervous system, and the nervous system is from that moment forward on alert, looking for similar circumstances. When it detects them, that is a stimulus. Your nervous system thinks the trauma is happening again right now, and your brain plunges you into survival mode, aka fight or flight. You don’t get a choice. It does not consult you first. There is no warning. It does not take the time to ask your rational, thinking brain if there really is a danger. It just decides there is and mobilizes your body to react.
There is no time to pray about it. There is no casting. Before you can take your next breath, you are gasping and your heart is pounding, you are shaking and crying and sweating and your thinking brain is completely offline. It doesn’t build up; it happens in an instant. You can’t talk your way out of it because the language part of your brain is not available to you in that moment. Your body is simply reacting to an alert sent out by your amygdala—your brain’s fear center—and this happens in a split second. If you want to read a detailed description of a recent panic attack I had in an airplane, it is here.
So, while I do cast my care about the fact that I even have panic attacks on the Lord, when one actually hits, I just have to let my nervous system’s reaction run its course. According to people who know more than I do, panic attacks typically peak in 10–15 minutes and are over in 30. Most of mine have been shorter, one longer. I can tell you the effects last hours or days.
I can cast my burden of suffering panic attacks on the Lord (and I do), but when the panic attack itself strikes, there is no casting.
One of my hopes is that if I cast this burden on the Lord enough, he will simply remove it, but I don’t know whether that will happen or not. The Bible talks a lot about God walking us through the valley, through the storm, through the wilderness, and I know he does that with panic attacks too. I have seen his presence in the middle of them, kind of like seeing in the dark, as Brittany Tinsley says. I would prefer not to have them at all, but I trust that God has his reasons even while I hate it.
So cast your burdens. Cast your cares. And when you have a panic attack, look back at it and see God walking you through.