When Anxiety Meets Faith: Learning to Abide

What happens when you love Jesus and still live with anxiety?

This is the question at the heart of Nikki Florence Thompson’s deeply personal and beautifully written story. Nikki describes herself as an “anxious Christian” and writes with remarkable honesty about living with anxiety, panic, faith, grief, motherhood and the many unexpected turns of life.

Nikki brings not only professional understanding, but also a deeply personal awareness of what it can be like to experience anxiety while seeking to follow Christ.

When anxiety first arrived

Nikki can remember the first time panic disorder and anxiety entered her life. She was just 20 years old, about a year after the death of her beloved brother in a car accident near Nowra.

Over the following 20-plus years, anxiety would come and go in different forms and seasons. There were times of joy and times of profound challenge. There were experiences of grief, family illness, marriage, motherhood and faith—all woven together with the reality of living with anxiety. Following her mother’s illness, Nikki experienced hypervigilance and found herself living with a heightened awareness of what might go wrong. Then came a season of newly married happiness when she met and married “Dr T”, who went on to become a history professor. Yet even in the midst of happiness, anxiety resurfaced.

Nikki spent significant time with a psychologist she affectionately calls “the wise woman by the water.” Through this relationship, she began to explore some of the emotional baggage she had been carrying for years. She writes about fears that may seem unusual to others—fear of sunsets, fear of flying—and about the process of understanding what lay underneath those fears. Her story reminds us that anxiety is rarely just about the thing we are afraid of.

Sometimes there is a much deeper story underneath.

When faith itself becomes a source of anxiety

One of the most moving parts of Nikki’s story is her experience of what she calls “acute spiritual anxiety.” For many Christians experiencing anxiety, faith can sometimes become another area in which they feel they are failing. Nikki describes reading the Bible and feeling inadequate rather than encouraged. Words and Bible “nuggets” offered by other Christians could feel judgmental rather than comforting. Even attending church services could increase her anxiety. And in the midst of it all, she sometimes wondered:

Does God still love me?

This is an important question.

Christians can sometimes assume that anxiety and faith don't belong together. We can feel that if we truly trusted God, prayed enough, read our Bibles consistently enough or had enough faith, anxiety would disappear. But Nikki's story offers a different perspective. Nikki has learnt that God loves us in the midst of the anxiety.

Anxiety, grief, motherhood and uncertainty

Nikki is refreshingly honest about other parts of her story too. She writes about endometriosis and the journey through IVF with her husband. She writes about becoming a parent and what it means to navigate motherhood while living with anxiety. Her story doesn't present a neat, uncomplicated Christian life. Instead, it acknowledges that faith is lived in the middle of real life—with uncertainty, disappointment, joy, fear, grief and unanswered questions.

The gifts hidden within anxiety

Nikki has a PhD in literature from Macquarie University in Sydney. I thought this book was beautifully crafted, and I could not put it down. It is a deeply personal story that is helpful for both people with anxiety and those provide care. It is a book that explored how Christians live with anxiety, and Nikki even goes as far as penning the 'aching beauty and gifts' that anxiety brings.

It's time to stop battling.

It's time to stop trying to be perfect. Even in your

expectations of your capacity for faith.

It's time to trust Jesus, not yourself.

Because it is finished.

And because it is finished, even on those days when you

feel anxiety baring its teeth and opening its jaws to roar -

and you will again-you don't need to despair.

To fight, or to flee.

You just need to abide.

About the Author Lyndal Rogers

Lyndal is a registered counsellor with the Australian Counselling Association who offers compassionate, client-centred support that honours each person’s story, strengths, and faith. Her approach is gentle, holistic, and strengths-based, integrating emotional, cognitive, behavioural, and spiritual care. With over 40 years of experience across teaching, chaplaincy, overseas Christian ministry, and community development, Lyndal brings deep empathy shaped by her own life experiences, including international moves, cancer, and supporting family members through anxiety. She has a particular interest in supporting people through grief, life transitions, family and parenting challenges, anxiety and depression, spirituality and meaning, ministry life, and cancer-related experiences, and works with adults and teenagers aged 15+.