PANIC IN THE LOBBY
Dr. Manny Arango
Anxiety coiled itself around a young girl while she was standing in our church lobby on a Wednesday night. Minutes before our weekly worship service, she was fighting to breathe and relentlessly wiping tears from her face. I offered up prayers, seemingly in vain. My job was to protect and love these young people, but I felt powerless over the chaos of panic that had engulfed her.
Eventually her wave of anxiety subsided, but I never forgot this moment. I had preached dozens of messages about anxiety and panic. We had devoted prayer and ministry time specifically focusing on anxiety, but clearly, we hadn’ t cracked the code on the path to peace. After months of reflecting on this moment, I remembered that the creation account in Genesis has a whole lot to say about Chaos and that it describes the original state of creation as a deep, wild, raging ocean of Chaos. The opening words of the Bible declare:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.( Genesis 1:1 – 2)
God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was“ formless and empty.” In Hebrew, those terms are tohu and va-vohu, which translate into English as“ wasteness...
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