“Most of the things in life you truly care about are likely to be very ambiguous, and if you can’t foster some ability to make a place for ambiguity, you’re likely to be doomed to an act in the service of its elimination–which is really a fancy and roundabout way of saying that you’ll feel and suffer from anxiety much of the time.
Learning to love ambiguity can be a very powerful, if rather counterintuitive, act. By love here, we’re not talking about falling in love or being in love. We mean love as an act. You can learn to care for and cherish ambiguity. you can invite it into your house for a while, give it a glass of lemonade, talk with it, and listen to what it has to say to you. You’ll often find things in the midst of ambiguity that you can’t see of experience anywhere else. (things might go terribly, horribly wrong by Kelly G. Wilson & Troy Defrene, pp. 33).
As I read the above passage yesterday I was reminded of why I titled Chapter 1 in my book The Anxious Christian — Embrace Anxiety. A lot of people spend a lot of their life trying to avoid anxiety, but it’s actually when we embrace anxiety that we learn, grow and are transformed.
Are you embracing your anxiety or trying to avoid it?
