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Was it the pandemic? Or maybe just the mounting debt, rising costs, lack of affordable housing or health care, and crumbling disintegrations of American infrastructure met by the rise of AI and impending doom that left so many of us plagued by anxiety and depression?
I continue to wonder how exactly we expect people to be mentally well in a social structure designed to be extracting and debilitating. And as a girl raised to think that the King James Version of the Bible was somehow holier than any other translation, today’s text in the NRSV surprised me: Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.
I chuckled. Have we just been prescribed Jesus as spiritual Lexapro? I immediately had the mental image of a burly competitor (I suppose this means it would be Jesus?) in a lumberjack competition, outfitted in suspenders and plaid, lifting logs above their head and profusely grunting as they chucked them downriver. If only it were that easy!
Instead, the cares of this world seem only to multiply—at the level of the personal, the familial, the communal, and the global. But there’s something here in today’s set of axiomatic couplets that does bring me comfort—and more importantly, more comfort than that of swallowing my anxieties until they are all-consuming. And that is the reflexive action: God cares for you.
Here, we aren’t the only actors trying to develop yet another habit that will give us our best life. Instead, the image of God here is one that reminds us of our own tenderness. “I care about you” might perhaps feel like a copout—except that we have seen love at work, a force that extends beyond death back to life.
And the shift in language here—from translations that describe casting one’s cares to casting one’s anxieties—feels profound in this moment. I care about so very much in the world right now, and it so often seems in vain. Strategic overstimulation and desensitization and infinite access to all of the things all of the time have caused what some have called “compassion fatigue.” (Here, I know what it is to be tired and overwhelmed by the wounds of the world, which I would argue have compelled me toward more compassion, rather than fatigue—instead of being “too tired to care,” I’ve come closer to being galvanized, as Fannie Lou Hamer described, by being “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”)
The invitation isn’t to stop caring. It’s to shift the weight of that care off of any individual’s back and to leave one’s worries to the One who we will never have to worry whether or not he cares. Jesus does.
And as someone who, again, can be a little Type A about her own anxieties—and has an incredibly tight grasp—that clause is the one that allows me to ever so slightly loosen my grip. In a world seemingly more and more devoid of compassion and lacking any ethics of care—in which empathy is declared toxic—there is still God, the lumberjack to my logs, who also offers to wipe my tears away. Even in a Lenten world, we are reminded to be a resurrection people—and even as those sent to care for the world, we are reminded that we too are worthy of care. Sometimes the littlest things point best to the greatness of God.
