The Gift of Composure
We live in a reactive world—a world marked by polarity and panic. Whether personally, politically, or professionally, we probably all feel this to some degree or another. We know of our own nervous and anxious tendencies around others, we know of the politician who buckles and folds under pressure, and we know of the boss who overreacts and loses his cool.
Edwin Friedman, a respected author writing on this reality, says that we inhabit a “chronically anxious” society that has a deficient immune system—one incapable of curing its disease. We might be able to treat symptoms, but we rarely, if ever, get to the root of the problem. And for the most part, I think he’s right.
However, in environments like this, Friedman acknowledges that well-differentiated leaders sometimes do emerge who offer a calming presence that helps to quiet the generational anxiety.
[People] who can be separate [from the anxiety] while remaining connected and, therefore, can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity in response to the automatic reactivity of others ….
Maybe you know someone like that. Someone with composure and a level head. Someone who eases the pressure of a situation and offers solace. People flock to that kind of person. What a gift a composed person is to our overly anxious society. But where does true composure like that come from in this world that has gone reactively mad?
In the Bible, we find that the blessed man of Psalm 1 is, “Like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not whither. In all he does, he prospers” (Psalm 1:3). Isaiah sticks with the botanical language and calls these types of people sturdy “oaks of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:3).
Such people, like firmly established trees, are steady. They aren’t tossed to and fro. They don’t get blown away by every news headline or reaction. Their roots go deep. And they absorb the anxious weather around them rather than reactively respond to it.
On the flip side, our anxiety often stems from our inability to rest in the providence and sovereignty of God. It comes when we try to control things that we were never meant to control:
I just want that person to like me, then I’ll stop being anxious around others.
Can you believe that he is our president? This is insane.
Why am I always getting the short end of the stick? Maybe God doesn’t like me.
The list goes on, ad infinitum.
But instead of reacting in the same way the world around us reacts to things that are outside of our control, what if we rested in the providence of God?
Question 35 of the Heidelberg Catechism asks: What do you understand by the providence of God? The answer should be a balm to our chronically anxious souls:
“God's providence is his almighty and ever present power, whereby, as with his hand, he still upholds heaven and earth and all creatures, and so governs them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand.”
Question 36 follows this up by asking: What does it benefit us to know that God has created all things and still upholds them by his providence? Again, the answer provides supernatural fertilizer to our root system, equilibrating our reactivity:
“We can be patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity, and with a view to the future we can have a firm confidence in our faithful God and Father that no creature shall separate us from his love; for all creatures are so completely in his hand that without his will they cannot so much as move.”
In God’s common grace, yes, we can meet unbelieving, non-anxious people who aren’t panic-stricken by the things going on around them—those people do exist. But how much more composure should Christians have considering that we know the God who controls all things?
Christians ought to be—to borrow language from Friedman—people who are separated from, but connected to the anxious world around them. They ought to maintain a non-anxious and challenging presence to the panicked people they meet. And through Spirit wrought self-control, they ought to manage their reactivity as they rest in the providence of God.
With calmed and quieted souls (cf. Psalm 131), Christians ought to offer their composure as a gift to everyone they meet. And by God’s grace, may we become such people.