“I am afraid because my body is not working right,” writes Blair Linne, a Bible teacher and poet, in her new book. “My mind is not working the way it once did.”
Anyone familiar with anxiety will understand the fear behind these statements. Anxiety disorder is a mental illness in which a person’s body and mind have heightened responses to threats that may or may not be real. Approximately a third of US adults will experience an anxiety disorder in their lifetime.
In Made to Tremble: How Anxiety Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to My Faith, Linne gives a compelling account of how mental illness forced her to passionately search for God’s faithfulness.
Gen Z Is More Than Just Anxious
Anxiety entered Linne’s life a few years ago, when she was in a car accident. Although she was not seriously injured at the time, she soon began having troublesome episodes of breathlessness, rapid heartbeat, sweating, trembling, nausea, and intrusive thoughts. She visited the emergency room; doctors told her everything was fine. But for months, as she tried to care for her family and teach in the church, she felt unsteady. At any moment, her vision might blur. Her heart might race. Her breathing might become ragged. Or her limbs might sink. But she couldn’t predict when.
The anxiety was generalized—her body perceived and responded to threats that her mind wanted to explain away. Many people express the unpleasant surprise of managing physical distress symptoms that won’t go away even when they “know better.”
Linne found little support from her church tradition. Many of us feel shame when sickness affects our minds, especially when it appears in our body or behaviors. Christians hold that the mind should be driving the bus, disciplining the body and its passions, not the other way round. Aren’t we commanded to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5) and “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2)? What does it mean to lose rational control and struggle to curb our panic? Are we unfaithful? Are we already defeated?
On the contrary, Linne says, anxiety might turn our lives upside down, but it isn’t unfaithful. Denying the body’s real power to determine mental health is gnostic, not biblical. Anxiety is a natural and even expected way that human bodies express their createdness in God. Moreover, anxiety is an authentic concession to the fallen nature of the world. It can even be a way that God increases our awe, trust, and delight in him. Nothing is outside God’s redemptive purposes.
In Made to Tremble, Linne sets out to trace a theological path that can guide others caught in their own storms. It is a tricky mission. On the one hand, she wants to avoid the false message of religious do-it-yourselfers, who wave “jazz hands, glitter, and ‘you can do it’ banners,” and tell anxiety-sufferers to pray harder and “rebuke the devil.” On the other, she wants to honor the desire for spiritual answers for the suffering that comes with anxiety. She succeeds because she is a gifted theologian and a devoted follower of Jesus. Pastorally, she knows what she is about.
Humans are inherently “made to tremble,” Linne writes. All this means is that we are contingent beings completely reliant on our Creator and the environment he sustains. This basic fact is knowable by our waking minds: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7). It is also “understood” by our created bodies, which register God’s supremeness by instinct. “We’re more than animals,” a friend told me once, “but we’re not less.”
Although the book doesn’t cover medical research, I am fascinated by the animal nature of anxiety. Our brain, we believe, is the rational center that tells the rest of our body what to do. Interestingly, our gut is constantly sending other information along the vagus nerve back to the head—essentially calling the shots in the direction opposite of what we expect.
Doctors recognize our digestive system as our “second brain.” Food, movement, noises, smells, bacteria, hormones—even love and conflict!—all influence how our brain decides to act. Much of what we think, feel, and do, including anxiety, arises from what the gut says. Surely we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
The problem is that our bodies and the world are broken. The moment sin entered the world in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve were keenly aware of their vulnerability. Our body’s capacity to respond to an almighty, loving God, a capacity intended for our delight and his glory, became distorted. We now react to dangers and the reality of death; sometimes our bodies under- or over-react. Anxiety is one way that our bodies “speak” about living with sin in a sinful world.
Linne thus brings us coherently through the why of anxiety: It is not a personal failure but a natural consequence of having a disordered body within a disordered world. This sounds like bad news, but it can be a balm for the sense of fault that often accompanies mental illness. We want to know we’re not to blame. We want to know we’re not hopelessly lost.
She then turns to hope, which comes through Jesus Christ. He “suffered and trembled for us,” conquered death, and opened the way for us to be perfectly at ease with the Father. If God has so faithfully managed our worst fears, how much more will he be faithful in the lesser ones! A time is coming when all illness will be over: “Anxiety’s days are numbered.” If this sounds like an anxiety edition of the gospel, it is. Chapter 5 ends with an altar call.
Anxiety has a way of pitting us against our own bodies, but it doesn’t have to be this way. As Linne notes, we honor the body’s trembly nature by doubling down on God-ordained practices, like worship, prayer, and rest. We celebrate our embodiment with his gifts of nutritious food, sleep, nature, friendship, and family bonds.
Linne gives principles for when prayer for healing or against spiritual attack might be used—giving no guarantees, but equipping readers to take the Lord seriously at his invitation to pray boldly. Anxiety might be a time to concede our limitations and to learn new ways to cast our cares upon him. Linne recounts her petitions to God made minute by minute through feelings of heavy dread. “One of the most courageous things you can do,” she writes, “is ask Him for help.”
Anxiety is a kind of suffering, and suffering almost always whispers of failure. We shun it. Yet for Jesus, suffering was not a mark of failure but one of incomparable triumph. Those who suffer are precious to him; he will “consider their grief and take it in hand” (Ps. 10:14). Even if her prayers are not answered, Linne finds that Jesus is an attentive Savior and loving friend. She echoes Joni Eareckson Tada’s words from her 2019 book A Place of Healing: “He has chosen not to heal me but to hold me.” This is no silver lining, but pure gold.
Your Likes Are But Dust
I resonated with Linne’s insight that ministry to others is still possible and often even strengthened through mental illness. In managing anxiety, we may try to tighten control over as much as possible, but that is bondage. Amid seasons of anxiety, there is nothing more freeing than turning our spirits outward and inviting others into our life with God. Freedom of spirit in the face of physical limitation is compellingly Christlike. Linne turns the tables, showing that instead of anxiety leading to a diminished life, it can be a gateway to seeing hope and joy pour into a hungry world.
Anxiety symptoms—their intensity and confusion—are hard to describe. Linne falters on occasion by heavy reliance on various water and weather metaphors. While biblical and poetic—rough seas and rising waters often signify chaos in Scripture—too many images in short succession distract rather than illuminate. One paragraph went from ocean waves to an undertow to river rapids to pelting rain to a serene lake in a disorienting litany.
The book’s devotional cadence may inadvertently push readers toward a notion Linne critiques, that anxiety is best handled spiritually. The one chapter not focused on theological resources does mention other treatments, like counseling, medication, and lifestyle changes, but seems preoccupied with justifying them as spiritually acceptable. It may be too elevated for those trying to get relief from acute or long-term symptoms. A committed Christian friend of mine recently told me, “I only really got better when I treated anxiety as a purely physical condition.”
I understand the impulse for supportive theology, though, and I honor the outcome in Made to Tremble. The real story of a long-term illness is about making sense of one’s place in the world, and this is often a spiritual subject. Linne’s story of freedom in anxiety is a testament to God’s power and love, which shine through an experience that might have portended only sorrow. She has found herself carried like a lamb near the heart of her Shepherd, who holds his arms open to every one of us.
Wendy Kiyomi is an adoptive parent, scientist, and writer in Tacoma, Washington, whose work on faith, adoption, and friendship has also appeared in Plough Quarterly, Image, Mockingbird, and The Englewood Review of Books. She is a 2023 winner of the Zenger Prize.
