Advent 1

One morning a wife asked her husband whether he had any dark stuff. He admitted that yes, lately he had been feeling a paralyzing mix of anxiety and depression.

To which she replied, “No, no, no, I’m just getting ready to do a load of laundry.”

Yes, we live in anxious times.

Climate change. Political polarization. Rising crime rates. Natural disasters. The economic and personal stresses of the recent pandemic.

No wonder we feel fear, dread, and uneasiness.

In addition, there are many everyday things that can make us anxious: News alerts on our phones. Not getting enough sleep. Being overcommitted. An unbalanced diet, including too much caffeine. Sunday nights.

Yes, Sunday nights.

“It’s common for people to feel anxious [as] the weekend winds down,” says Dr. Sanam Hafeez on a website called The Healthy. “When your mind begins to focus on reports, kids’ activities, and the long list of to-dos, it’s easy to slip into an anxious state of mind.”

The flood of anxiety that many of us feel as the workweek approaches is called the “Sunday scaries.” And Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic, says that this anxiety is linked to “the modern psychology of time.” We find Sunday to be scary because we embrace a distinctively modern view of time.

Today, we have two modes of thinking, says Thompson: “productivity mind and leisure mind.” Monday through Friday is when we use our productivity mind, working hard and showing our industriousness. On Saturday and Sunday, we activate our leisure mind, which allows us to rest and play. But on Sunday evening, the two enter into a tug-of-war. We fall into the Sunday scaries because we feel guilty about relaxing over the weekend and apprehensive about the workweek that lies ahead.

We need to realize, however, that humans have not always had this experience. Research has found that hunter-gatherer groups have typically avoided anxiety about the future. They “rarely stored food for more than a few days,” says Thompson. “Trusting in the abundance of their environment, [they] worked to meet their absolute needs, and then stopped to rest, rather than planning ahead.”

Hunter-gatherer groups lived in the gift of the day, like the Israelites in the wilderness. As they traveled to the promised land, the Israelites received the food they needed each day, bread-like manna from God, and they did not have to worry about the future. They trusted in the abundance of their environment and avoided the struggle between productivity mind and leisure mind.

Today, we are not hunter-gatherers, nor are we Israelites in the wilderness. But we can overcome some of the struggle between productivity mind and leisure mind by trusting in the abundance of God. We can lower our anxiety about the future by believing that God will provide for us.

Yes, it is true that God wants us to work in the world to meet our needs. But we should also take the time to rest. In God’s design for our lives, the two do not have to be in conflict.

For me (and for so many of us), our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is, “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of our hours and days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining or worrying about what we don’t have enough of. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or what we didn’t get done that day.

Psalm 25 is a prayer that is clearly written in a time of anxiety. The writer is asking for help — for deliverance from enemies (vv. 2-3), for guidance and instruction (vv. 4-5), for forgiveness (vv. 6-7), and for relief from distress (vv. 16-18). We could say that the writer is feeling the Sunday scaries.

“To you, O Lord, I lift my soul,” says the psalm-writer. “O my God, in you I trust” (vv. 1-2). The writer senses that the only way out of fear, dread, and uneasiness is to turn to God in faith and expectation. “To offer one’s life to God means to trust God amid threatening circumstances,” says Bible professor J. Clinton McCann. “To offer one’s life to God means also to wait for God, to live with hope.”

Trust God. Wait for God. Live with hope.

The psalmist knows that he needs help with this, so he prays, “Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation” (vv. 4-5). He is asking to be shown a new way through life, a fresh path. He asks to be taught by God and led in the truth of God, because he believes that God will save him from destruction.

In place of the Sunday scaries, the writer wants a life of health and wholeness.

This should be our prayer as well. And fortunately for us, when we ask for guidance and deliverance, we discover that all “the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees” (v. 10). God shows us a love that is solid and never-ending, along with a faithfulness that remains unbroken in every time and place and situation. God offers these gifts to us freely and asks only that we remain in relationship with God and do our best to follow God’s commandments.

In short, the cure for anxiety is to focus on God, rather than on our work. And when we do this, we find that God provides us with what we need. We don’t have to be anxious about the future.

It’s said that novelists Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were once attending a fancy party at a private home in Shelter Island, New York. Vonnegut informed Heller that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a day than Heller had earned from his best-selling novel, Catch-22.

“Yes,” responded Heller, “but I have something he will never have: enough.”

The next four weeks of the Advent season will give us an excellent opportunity to turn to God. The word Advent means “coming,” and it is the time each year in which we prepare ourselves for the arrival of Jesus at Christmas. In this season, we are invited to look forward in hope, not anxiety. To put our faith in Jesus, not in ourselves. To believe that God really has come in human form to heal us, help us, provide for us, and save us.

Jesus is the cure for the Sunday scaries. He reminds us that we cannot serve both God and wealth (Matthew 6:24), and he counsels us not to worry about what we will eat or drink or wear. “Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things,” says Jesus. “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (vv. 32-33).

Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, says Jesus. Instead of feeling a tug-of-war between productivity mind and leisure mind, shift your attention to “kingdom mind.”

For when you focus on God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, the Sunday scaries will just fade away.