Day 20 - Reject the EasyWay

A Weightless Devotional

“Enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. But the gate is narrow and the way is difficult that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
—Matthew 7:13–14

Being anxious is easy. It doesn’t take a lot of work to become anxious, just a lot of letting go and letting worry dominate your life. Anxiety is easy because it prompts you to walk through the wide and spacious way where you can make your own path, set your own plans, and try to manage your own problems. That way is easier than the narrow and difficult way that Jesus tells us about in Matthew 7, because it doesn’t require the difficult job of trusting and of hoping in God to be good enough, powerful enough, and to love you enough to take care of you in the midst of the chaos around and within you.

After we enter into relationship with God through the Gate—Jesus Himself—we find ourselves with a choice; we can either walk the narrow path by trusting Jesus’ with the things that plague us and make us anxious, or we can let ourselves slip into the wide way that is opened up all around us. This path represents the worldly and superficial approach to our worries that, in the end, leaves us with anxiety, unease, or even dis-ease.

Walking the narrow path requires you to accept some countercultural truths. One of those truths involves rethinking a prominent source of your anxiety: suffering. Discomfort, or actually just the fear of discomfort, is often the real genesis of your anxiety. The belief that you might not only dislike what is about to come but that it could destroy you feeds your anxiety and opens up the way to the wide path that leads only to your destruction, as it fills you with more what-ifs than hope and more doubt than trust.

Anxiety, at its core, is a kind of spiritual amnesia. Having forgotten that suffering isn’t an obstacle to the life of faith but a pathway that leads us through the narrow gate, we turn to anxiety to “help” us illuminate the twisted path we see before us. But when we remember the value suffering gives to our lives, we find less of a need to panic and are given more of an opportunity to experience the peace, joy, and rest of Jesus. Though the narrow way may be difficult, the reward is glorious.