The fear usually comes with a second fear attached. First the racing heart, the dread, the mind running ahead to every bad outcome. Then the quieter accusation: if I really trusted God, I wouldn’t feel this way. A Christian can feel deeply anxious and still be trusting God. Anxiety does not prove that faith has failed. Often it exposes something narrower: how hard we are gripping for a control we never had. Faith takes the trembling to God instead of gripping harder.
Blair Linne, a writer and spoken word poet, spent four to five years learning this the hard way. Her book Made to Tremble carries the subtitle How Anxiety Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to My Faith. That is a strong claim from someone who describes feeling anxious every single day for years. It is worth slowing down to see what she means and what she doesn’t.
Doesn’t feeling this anxious mean I’m not trusting God?
That assumption is where most of the pain lives, so name it plainly. Linne carried it herself. “I never would’ve considered myself to be an anxious person,” she says. She saw herself as independent, someone used to balancing a lot at once.
Then a hard season stacked up. Her family moved to Philadelphia so her husband could help plant a church. They had three children, all three and under. She was homeschooling and discipling other women. Shortly after the move, a deer totaled their car. Everyone seemed fine physically, but Linne believes her body was in shock, and soon after, while driving, she had her first panic attack. She did not know what it was. She thought she was dying.
What followed was fear and shame together. “Based upon how I was taught, I didn’t think that you would be dealing with anxiety as a Christian,” Linne says. The message she had absorbed was simple: a little more faith, a little more Scripture, and everything would be fine. So every anxious day became evidence against her.
That teaching treats anxiety as one thing, always a choice, always a spiritual failure, always fixable by more devotion. Linne kept reading her Bible and praying, and she still felt anxious every day for years. More effort at the same disciplines did not switch off what was happening in her body. Under the old teaching, that could only mean she was failing.
Scripture tells a different story about God’s people. Linne names the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, along with Elijah and the disciples, as people who struggled with fear and with trust. Seeing how many of the saints wrestled this way opened her eyes. The Psalms say it with disarming honesty: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee” (Psalm 56:3). The writer describes trust happening while he is afraid. He makes no claim that the fear has left.
Is all anxiety the same thing?
This distinction loosened the knot for Linne. She draws on the Puritan writer John Flavel, who sorted fear into three kinds: natural fear, sinful fear and what he called religious fear.
Natural fear, as Linne explains it, is the troubled mind that rises when danger approaches. God built it into us. When someone threatens a person you love and adrenaline surges, that response is not sin. In many ways it keeps us alive.
Sinful fear is the worry Scripture warns against. Linne describes it as a kind of division, a self split in many directions at once. That is the anxiety she says can be sin.
Then there is the fear of God, which she calls a sanctified fear. “It’s a reverence that’s inspired by love and respect,” she says, like a child toward a father. It carries no terror. “It’s not that we’re concerned with condemnation, because if we belong to him, it has nothing to do with punishment,” Linne explains, because that punishment has already been placed on Christ. Her point echoes 1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.” Fear of punishment torments. Reverence before a loving Father does not.
Linne adds one more category the shame-based teaching misses entirely: affliction. Some anxiety is not a mind choosing to worry. “But sometimes it’s physiological,” she says. Your heart pounds, and then you become afraid of what the pounding means. That is suffering in a body, and it calls for care. Linne describes herself as a whole person who needed both spiritual and natural means: green space and blue space, a hard look at her schedule, and eventually counseling. Seeking that kind of help is not a failure of faith, and God works through trained counselors and clinicians. If panic symptoms are new, a doctor is a faithful place to start.
So the honest answer to “Is my anxiety sin?” is: maybe some of it, maybe none of it, and almost certainly not all of it in the same way. Sorting it is how you figure out what kind of help you actually need.
What is anxiety grabbing for?
When anxiety is the sinful kind, Linne says, its engine is usually control. “With anxiety, often what it is, is we want control,” she says. We are trying to keep our lives, our situations and our concerns together.
Then she names the problem with that project. “But the truth is we don’t have control.” She calls the idea that we are in control a farce, and she sets it against the one fact that changes the whole picture: “There’s only one who is not anxious.”
That sentence reframes the question you started with. Anxiety of this kind comes from a mistaken job description. We have quietly hired ourselves to hold the world together, and the job is too big. Of course we feel overwhelmed. We are attempting God’s work with human hands. Many believers live in exactly this gap: a real, spoken trust in God alongside an unspoken belief that the outcome still depends on them, so they rush around helping God out.
Much of what feeds that gap is not sinful activity at all. It is too many good things. When Linne counted up the women she was discipling, she reached ten, and a friend pointed out, with some humor, that she was nearly at Jesus’s twelve. Jesus himself withdrew and rested. Letting go of control can look as ordinary as doing less, keeping a Sabbath, or admitting that this season calls for pulling back.
This is why Linne can say something surprising about anxiety without calling it good. “Not that anxiety is good, but I think what it does is it exposes our humanity,” she says. “And it helps us to see we are not God.” The anxiety itself is the alarm. What it reveals is the gift: the illusion of being in charge, finally visible enough to surrender.
But didn’t Jesus rebuke his disciples for being afraid?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight look. In the storm, after Jesus calms the sea, he asks, “Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?” (Mark 4:40). Paul writes, “Be careful for nothing” (Philippians 4:6). In the KJV, careful means full of care, or anxious. These are real words, and they carry weight.
Linne does not deny them. She is the one who insists sinful anxiety exists. But read the passages in context. In Mark 4, the frightened disciples wake Jesus, and he stills the storm before he asks his question. He does not refuse to help until their fear is fixed. By the time he exposes where their trust was placed, the sea is already calm.
Philippians 4:6 does not stop at the prohibition either. The full verse reads: “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.” The instruction gives anxious care a destination: toward God, in prayer, with the actual request. 1 Peter 5:7 says the same: “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.”
So the Bible does call believers away from anxious care. It does not treat anxious believers as fakes, and it does not promise that the feeling will vanish on command. The movement it asks for is toward God, and that movement is available while you are still shaking.
What does running to God actually look like?
Linne grew up hearing “cast your cares” in church. In the middle of panic, she discovered she did not know what it meant. “I had to admit that I don’t know how,” she says. Many anxious Christians already know the verse. What they lack is a picture of doing it.
Her encouragement is direct: run to him, and go first to the one who has sufficient resources. Then she turns it into a question worth carrying around: “So what does it look like to be so dependent upon God that you’re going to him for every single thing that you need.”
The clearest picture she offers came from someone else’s suffering. Linne once prayed with a sister who has been paralyzed since she was seventeen and has faced more than one cancer diagnosis. That sister prayed, God, help me to breathe. Linne, in the thick of her own panic attacks, was struck. “We all need God’s help to breathe,” she says. “Not one of us has breath in their body due to their own strength or own ability.”
That small prayer turns the control problem inside out. Panic attacks often feel like a fight for air. Linne realized the air was never hers to secure. God, as she puts it, holds the universe together and holds our bodies together. A prayer for breath asks for what we have always been receiving, which makes it about as honest as prayer gets.
This is also what the title Made to Tremble holds together. We tremble because we are human and not God. Our circumstances make us tremble. And we are made to tremble before God in awe. Linne hopes the first two kinds will send us toward the third. Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, “and his train filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1). Linne points to that vision of God’s holiness and power as the place where anxious control loses its grip. Once you see who is actually on the throne, holding everything yourself starts to look less like responsibility and more like confusion.
She draws on Job as well. Job’s wife told him, “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9). Linne sees every deep affliction bringing a version of that decision: trust, or turn away. She does not promise that trusting will explain the suffering. We may not understand why God allows what he does, she says, but we can know who we will gain in the process. Lament and unanswered questions stay part of the picture. What she found was God himself, closer, in the middle of it.
Why does hiding make it worse?
If anxiety is grabbing for control, isolation is where the grabbing feels most at home. Linne had been, in her words, “I’m the strong friend,” the one who gives counsel. Once she realized she was having panic attacks, shame drove her inward.
At a dinner with friends, she felt a panic attack coming. She went to the bathroom, splashed water on her face, and told herself to get it together. Looking back, she can name what she believed: “not only do I need to handle this on my own, which is what the lie I was believing.” A second belief rode along with it: “I don’t wanna be a burden to them, and that’s another lie.”
Both lies are control in disguise. Handling it alone keeps the problem under your management. Not burdening others keeps your image under your management. Eventually Linne went back to the table, said she was feeling anxious, and asked her friends to pray. “All my friends prayed for me right there, and I actually felt better,” she says.
The same shift came in worship. Standing at church, feeling faint, she would start to spiral about passing out in front of everyone. She describes it as trying to “fight anxiety with anxiety.” Then she began asking a different question: “Like, what’s the worst that could happen? I’m with people that love me.” The worst outcome was being caught by people who loved her.
A life of remote work, virtual church and friendships kept to the minimum makes that kind of catching nearly impossible. Linne’s community was close enough to show up. When she spent two or three weeks in bed, too dizzy to function, people brought meals and folded laundry, and her church, “out of the Benevolence Fund, paid for counseling for me.” Prayer, meals and a counselor all came from the same body of believers. None of them competed with her faith. They were how her faith was being carried.
So return to the question you started with. If you really trusted God, would you still feel this anxious? You might. Trust is not measured by whether the alarm goes off. It shows in where you run when it does. You can resign from the job of holding everything together, ask for help to breathe, and say the true sentence out loud to someone who loves you. Linne says she wrote “from the pew to come alongside to take away the shame.” The shame was never the faithful part.