Curtis Chang, the regular host of the Good Faith podcast, takes a turn in the “guest seat” in this special episode in which Nancy French interviews him about his new book, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self. Curtis, who has suffered from anxiety to the point of losing his job as a senior pastor, offers up hard-earned wisdom that could transform one’s view on parenting, relationships, and even politics.

Curtis also talks about the way the church gets anxiety wrong, how Jesus dealt with anxious people, and how grieving is a necessary component of effectively walking through loss.

Editor’s Note: This excerpt was lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

NANCY FRENCH: A passage of the book really affected me about the inevitability of loss. In the course of your day, you may look in the mirror and realize you’ve lost your look, the tautness of your skin, money in your wallet, or a job. Your book, The Anxiety Opportunity, helped me reframe my view of these losses. Can you talk about getting back what you lose?

CURTIS CHANG: Yes, this gets to the distinctive Christian response to anxiety. The most decisive response to anxiety is the resurrection. This is the heart of Jesus’ proclamation, that, in Jesus, Jesus has died and risen again.  And all of those who follow in his name will follow his very footsteps through death – not away and around death, not away and around loss, but through loss. And on the other side of loss is resurrection. 

It’s important to emphasize that resurrection is not the promise of loss avoidance. It’s the exact opposite, right, because we only get to resurrection through loss, through death. That’s what resurrection is: we die, we lose everything, and then all of it is restored to us, returned to us, not by our own efforts, but through the resurrection power and love of Jesus. That’s the gospel. 

We have to tie that into anxiety. The mistaken belief is that God is some cosmic insurance broker in the sky who exists to make sure we will never experience loss. It’s quite the opposite. We’re actually told we will lose all. We are going to follow Jesus, and we will take up our cross, die, and lose things. But we’re able to go through that loss held by Jesus, trusting that as we walk through that doorway of loss – both the little losses and the big loss of our life. That doorway opens up to resurrection. And resurrection is when we get back what we lose, our body, our relationships, all of our embodied experiences that we fear losing, what we will eat, drink, or wear, to echo Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount. Then all of those losses are returned to us, not just in its old form, but in an imperishable form – as Paul says – in a glorified form.  

That’s an amazing promise, but that resurrection promise means we have to go through loss. And this is why we have to go through anxiety, because anxiety equals loss. So if we’re afraid of loss and want to avoid it – and therefore avoid all anxiety – then it means we’re not going to go through it. We’re not going to actually go through that doorway, which is the only doorway that leads to true restoration. 

This is why we cannot treat anxiety solely as a problem to go away, because we are closing that door marked “resurrection.” It’s only through loss that we can open that door and go through it and get what is on the other side – which is our best self and our best world restored to us.

NANCY FRENCH: This has huge ramifications for parents. I have the inclination to help my kids avoid loss.  I was just playing with our toddler granddaughter who broke some sidewalk chalk and was weeping over the fact that it was broken. 

At first I was thinking, “Maybe I could tape this. Maybe I could super glue it.” And then I thought, “It’s a piece of chalk, I’m not going to do that.” 

I tried to spin it. “Oh, now we have two pieces of chalk. Now I can have one and you can have one. Now we can turn it on its side and make hearts.” None of that worked. And then when I took her hand and I said, “Yeah, it’s sad when things break,” she looked at me, stopped crying, and began to deal with it. It was like she recognized I was respecting her loss.

And so what is the relationship between grieving and anxiety?

CURTIS CHANG: Oh, Nancy, I love that example. You didn’t try to sweep in there and give her the illusion that loss is never experienced, even as a toddler, but to actually grieve it. And that is exactly one of the ways in which Jesus teaches us to hold loss, right? The opposite of avoiding loss is holding loss. This is the other formula that I present: anxiety = loss ÷ holding. This is the resurrection formula. It’s not that loss goes away, but loss is held by the presence of Jesus, even in the midst of loss. The loss is held by the promise of restoration. Grieving is really an important practice, because it teaches us that loss is not something that is catastrophically disastrous and unbearable, right? 

It’s when we think loss is unbearable, that we want to avoid it and make it go away. But what grieving tells us is, “oh, no, it actually is bearable.” Grieving is bearing the loss. It is feeling it, experiencing, mourning it, being sad about it, and then – as we go through it, not away, not around it, not avoiding it, but go through it – we realize, “Well, that was hard, that was painful, but it’s bearable. We can actually bear it. We can actually suffer, be sad, and come out on the other side of it.”

When we practice grieving, we are developing our capacity to hold loss. And that grieving isn’t alone in our stoic strength, it is grieving with Jesus, who holds us in our grief. Also we share it with others, so we’re not alone in it. We were designed to hold loss not as individual beings, but rather in community with others. I have an image of you bending down with Lila, and teaching her to hold a broken piece of chalk, grieving that loss together. You probably held it with her in your collective hands. That’s a beautiful vision of how we are meant to hold all of our losses as, like, “Yeah, this is sad. This is broken. And we ought to be sad, and we can be sad together.”

Editor’s Note:  We at Redeeming Babel are grieving the death of Tim Keller, who affected the church and the city of New York immeasurably with his message of the gospel. To honor his memory, here’s a video of Tim on Russell Moore’s podcast answering the question: what do you do when you are fearful of the future? His answer is beautiful and true.