Curtis Chang > Quotes

“the key insight for now is that we will miss Jesus’ solution if we follow some narrative that pushes everything out toward external blame. Such a narrative is like a faulty sign pointing us away from Jesus because his acceptance of us takes place inside us—it doesn’t happen “out there.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“Why stock their minds with such images? The Christian inscriptions and artwork decorating these rooms explain the purpose. They are filled with words and images depicting the theme of the resurrection. The images include paintings like the one in the Catacombs of Praetextatus of a lush olive harvest (the crop Romans saw in their fields, like the crops of wheat Jesus saw in his area).5 Even as a modern, I experienced those resurrection images in an intensified spiritual light precisely because they were juxtaposed next to stark images of death.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“Our Not Yet body of glory grows out of our Now body of struggle.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“All of this avoidance was understandable, well-meaning, and in fact filled with love. But the end result turned out to be greater levels of anxiety.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“In the “grain of wheat” metaphor, Jesus insists if we wish to hold on to the throughline to eternity, we have to follow that line through death. We have to imagine death enough to see it not as some utterly aversive event we go away from or around, but instead as something recognizable enough to go through. When we thoughtfully stock our minds with images of death, we give the Spirit of Jesus the raw material to draw mental throughlines from death to resurrection.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“Too many Christian communities (charismatic or otherwise) tend to avoid casting doubt on whether leaders heard God correctly in a promised healing, so the pressure of doubt backs up on the disappointed person. Some who have experienced these kinds of dashed expectations end up doubting God (maybe God doesn’t exist—or if God deliberately raised my hopes just to dash them, then maybe God isn’t that loving). Others doubt themselves (maybe I do lack faith or maybe I am harboring some hidden sin). The confusion, doubts, and uncertainties are driven underground, but they are there. And left unaddressed, these spiritual anxieties can fester, multiply, and seep into our relationship with God.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“We must nurture our capacity for prayers of submission. If we remain stuck only in prayers of avoidance, we are vulnerable to believing that avoiding loss is the only acceptable outcome. When we ask for only one thing, we are essentially insisting that it is the only acceptable thing. This insistence leaves us highly vulnerable to a range of Satan’s temptations. We are vulnerable to engaging in all sorts of problematic behavior.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“The more a community can hold one another’s anxieties, the closer it becomes, which further grows its collective holding capacity, which draws people further in, and so on and so forth. New doors are opened, the extraordinary is made ordinary, and we discover our best selves.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“There’s one highly effective intervention only you can deliver in a dosage more potent than any secular medical professional could deliver: you can provide acceptance. Radical, loving, compassionate acceptance. The “Jesus touching the leper” kind of acceptance. The acceptance that is expressed with hugs, reassuring pats, and sometimes just the kind of silent but loving physical presence of a parent that anxious children can feel in their bones.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“Large-scale studies of thousands of youth show that the average anxiety level of a young person now exceeds the levels recorded by hospitalized psychiatric patients in the 1950s.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“I happen to like Philippians 4:6, but I also don’t like how it is used as a “clobber verse” to make anxious people feel like they’re doing something wrong or, even worse, that there is something wrong about them. As with most clobber verses, in this situation it is being used out of context.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“Anxiety is an opportunity for any Christian to grow from just wanting the blueprint to wanting the Architect. Many of us may have started our Christian life thinking that this new way of life was a blueprint for avoiding loss.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

“To hang on through loss, I need to hang on to a throughline.”
― Curtis Chang, The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self