Little Wren Writes

I’ve been thinking lately about how close anxiety and awe really are.

At first, that sounds ridiculous. They feel like complete opposites.

One tightens your chest. The other takes your breath away. One keeps you awake at night. The other makes you stop and stare. One whispers, “Look what could go wrong.” The other quietly asks, “Have you noticed what is already beautiful?”

But the more I pay attention, the more I wonder if they’re both asking the same question.

What is bigger than me?

Anxiety is what happens when I become convinced that something bigger than me is coming to hurt me.

A conversation I can’t control.
A phone call I don’t want to answer.
A future I can’t predict.
A grief that feels too heavy.
A mistake I can’t undo.
A goodbye.
A silence that lasts longer than I expected.

My mind is remarkably creative.

Given enough time, it can build entire futures that never happen. It writes stories with frightening confidence. It fills in the gaps with worst-case scenarios and then presents them as facts. Sometimes, before breakfast, I’ve lived through ten imaginary disasters.

None of them were real. Every one of them felt real.

Perhaps you’ve been there too.

Anxiety has an extraordinary ability to make tomorrow feel louder than today. It pulls us into futures we haven’t lived and asks us to carry burdens we haven’t been given.

Jesus seemed to understand that tendency long before psychologists gave it a name.

“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”

He wasn’t pretending tomorrow would be easy. He was gently reminding us that today already has enough to carry.

Awe also begins with something bigger than me.

But instead of shrinking my world, it expands it.

I’ve felt it standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon as the sun disappeared behind the cliffs, and the sky slowly turned colours I don’t have names for. The kind of colours that make you instinctively stop talking because words suddenly seem too small.

I’ve felt it watching snow fall so quietly that the whole world seemed to hold its breath.

I’ve felt it sitting by the ocean, listening to waves that have been arriving long before I was born and will continue long after I’m gone.

I’ve felt it when a tiny blue wren landed nearby, completely unaware that it had just interrupted my racing thoughts.

I love that about birds. They don’t know they’re teaching theology. They simply keep singing.

For a few moments, my mind stopped trying to solve tomorrow. It simply noticed today.

Maybe that’s one of the quiet gifts of awe. It gently pulls us out of ourselves. It reminds us that we are wonderfully small.

And strangely, that’s not frightening.

It’s freeing.

Because if I am not the centre of the universe…

…then perhaps I don’t have to hold the universe together.

The funny thing is that anxiety and awe both begin with attention. Anxiety notices every possible threat. Awe notices every possible gift.

Both ask us to look closely. But they invite us to look in very different directions.

I’m learning that I can’t always choose whether anxiety knocks on the door. Sometimes it arrives before I’ve even had my morning cup of tea.

Sometimes it sits beside me in meetings.
Sometimes it follows me to bed.
Sometimes it wakes up before I do.

I’ve spent enough years trying to fight anxiety to know that shouting at it rarely helps. I’ve discovered something gentler instead that is slowly starting to help.

Noticing.

The warmth of the mug in my hands.
The laughter of friends in the next room.
The smell of rain drifting through an open window.
The weight of a blanket.
The first sip of tea.
A bird singing somewhere I can’t quite see.

None of those things solve anxiety. But they remind me that anxiety isn’t the only thing telling the story. There is another story unfolding at exactly the same time.

A story of quiet mercies. Of faithful friends. Of ordinary beauty. Of grace arriving in such unassuming ways that we almost miss it.

I wonder if that’s why Jesus so often pointed people towards creation.

“Consider the birds.”

“Look at the lilies.”

Not because birds erase suffering. Not because flowers solve grief. But because they remind us that we live in a world sustained by Someone infinitely more faithful than we are.

God seems surprisingly committed to redirecting our attention. Not because the hard things aren’t real. They are.

Heartbreak is real.
Trauma is real.
Fear is real.
Loss is real.

Jesus never denied any of those things. He wept. He grieved. He sweat drops of blood in Gethsemane.

The Christian life has never been about pretending pain doesn’t exist. It’s about learning that pain isn’t the whole story.

There is another voice. Quieter. Kinder. Steadier.

Not the voice that says,

“Everything will be okay.”

But the voice that says,

“I will be with you.”

I’ve begun to notice that anxiety makes my world smaller. It narrows my vision until all I can see is the problem standing in front of me.

Awe does the opposite.

It widens the lens. It reminds me that the God who hung stars in the sky also knows my name. The God who feeds sparrows has not forgotten me. The God who holds galaxies together is not surprised by the things that keep me awake at night.

That doesn’t make my anxiety disappear. But it does put it into perspective.

The older I get, the less interested I am in becoming fearless.

Instead, I want to become someone who notices.
Someone who notices beauty before rushing past it.
Someone who notices kindness.
Someone who notices God’s fingerprints in ordinary Tuesdays.
Someone who can still look up.

So today, I’m learning that awe isn’t the absence of anxiety.

Perhaps it’s simply the quiet practice of lifting our eyes again.

Again. And again.

Until we begin to notice that grace has been quietly standing beside us all along.

“The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.” — Psalm 33:5