Christians have an unusual relationship with trials. While we do not wish to go through trials, and while we generally try to avoid them, we also know that God uses them to accomplish his good purposes in the world and in our lives. Many of us live with a kind of tension: We would never have wanted to endure the hardships we have passed through, yet we would not want to lose the benefits we have gained through them, for it is often in our times of great sorrow and great difficulty that God does his greatest work within us. Some of God’s choicest fruits grow best in the dark.
Blair Linne understands this and gives evidence of it in the subtitle of her new book, Made to Tremble: How Anxiety Became the Best Thing that ever Happened to My Faith. That is a bold and almost shocking claim—that anxiety actually proved beneficial to her faith. Yet she speaks for many Christians when she expresses her conviction that those trials came to her through the hand of God and that they accomplished the work of God.
Made To Tremble sits comfortably at the intersection of theology and biography. Linne describes her lifelong battle with anxiety and the way it culminated in a car accident—an accident that led to several symptoms that together coalesced with other concerns and overwhelmed her life in a kind of anxiety tsunami.
Tsunamis are not just one wave. They are a series of several. When I look back on that season of my life, I see it so much more clearly now: I was being hit from different angles. In survival mode. When at what felt like my worst, I was on bed rest, unable to do much of anything for weeks. I was trying to honor God. Make it through the day. Stay sane. Encourage my husband, children, and the church. I was trying not to be overtaken by all these waves. Said another way, the car accident was like the first domino falling in a line of troubles. One bumping the other, bumping the other until I was surrounded by an army of collapsed white tiles with black dots aimed at me. When the accident happened, all those black dots released their missiles, and I was left with trauma. All the cares I just mentioned, from the move to the accident, occurred within four months.
Though doctors assured her she was medically fine, she knew she was not emotionally or spiritually fine and that something deeper was going on. Through the book, she explains how she grappled with the existence of anxiety, how she learned to come to terms with it, and how she applied Scriptural truths to it. Though she understands that she is likely to struggle with anxiety throughout her life, she traces the path that led her to gain a great deal of victory over it. She even goes so far as to see that anxiety was the means through which God taught her a great deal about herself and about his love for her.
Along the way, she writes about the tendency to flee from God and isolate ourselves. She explains how fear (and therefore anxiety) entered the world with humanity’s fall into sin and outlines the difference between righteous and sinful fears. She assures us that God seeks us out in our fear and means to soothe us, then tells how God uses our weaknesses to refine, strengthen, and sanctify his people. She tells what it means to cast our cares upon the Lord and to live boldly and righteously despite all the fears, cares, and sorrows of this world.
Made to Tremble is both warmly personal and deeply theological. It is also very practical while deliberately staying away from areas that would be better addressed by a medical professional. Though it is framed around her story, there is a sense in which it is everyone’s story, for while not all of us battle with anxiety, all of us go through some kind of a trial and experience some form of hardship. And many of us will find, as Linne did, that these trials, excruciating as they may be, are the means God uses to reveal his power and make us more like Jesus. These trials are not meant to crush our faith, but to refine and strengthen it. In the end, we may someday say with her that these trials are the best thing that ever happened to our faith.
