How Anxiety Changed My Understanding of the “Gentle and Quiet Spirit” from I Peter 3

I had to apologize to a friend the other day. For years she’d shared about her struggle with anxiety and I thought I knew exactly what she meant. But now, after a year and a half of my own battle with anxiety, I’ve realized that I didn’t really know what she was talking about.  

Specifically, I had no idea what it was like to lose sleep for days and weeks and months because your mind is racing until your body physically reacts because you’re unable to process the adrenaline rush that arrived from just the thoughts running through your head without pause.

It’s not that I’d never had anxiety at all. Of course, I did. We all do, I believe. But I didn’t understand the long-term effects that come when the pressure of anxiety never lets up.

One of my favorite things about God is that He is present and He speaks, even in the hard seasons. Or maybe especially in them? Regardless, He’s here. And just about the time I think, “Maybe I’m so lost I’ll never find my way out,” the Lord reveals something, heals something, rewrites something—and peace rushes in like the settling of a whirlwind.

This time I was driving to a meeting and my anxiety had peaked again over the previous several days. I was tense. Worried. A thousand conversations and explanations and pleadings rushed through my mind. As I drove down the dirt road by our house, I prayed, “Lord, gentle my words and quiet my mind.” I repeated the prayer over and over.

Gentle my words. Quiet my mind. Gentle my words. Quiet my mind. 

And somewhere during my chanting prayer, the words gentle and quiet caught my attention because they’re paired together in 1 Peter 3, where instructions were given to women about the kind of beauty we’re called to pursue.

We’re told to let our beauty be, “—the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.”[i]

Like many of the passages directed toward women in Scripture, this sentence has often been used to control or micromanage how women interact with the world around them. Women who are outgoing or loud, who are strong or fierce, often feel labeled and marked as something other than godly.

This, unfortunately, is the effect of translations and cultures and systems that have been used to control rather than free. We know that Jesus came that we might be free[ii], so anything that is used to control us, rather than for us to bear the Spirit’s fruit of self-control in our lives, is not being seen properly.

Regardless, in that moment—as I was driving and praying—this verse sharpened in my thoughts.

Wait, when we’re told that a gentle and quiet spirit is the beauty we’re supposed to pursue, is THIS what God means? To allow Him to gentle our words and quiet our thoughts? Not in a “how you behave” kind of way, but rather a “how you face the things happening inside your head” kind of way?

—

I went searching for the passage and reading up on the words used.

The term “gentle” here is the Greek “praus”, which is difficult to translate to English because we don’t have an English comparison to the prefix, “pra”. In Strong’s Concordance they give the definition of “pra” as demonstrating power without undo harshness. So “praus” carries the idea of holding a reserve and bearing strength.[iii]

Gentleness isn’t permissiveness. Gentleness isn’t backing down when someone pushes you. Gentleness isn’t hiding from confrontation.

Gentleness is holding your ground, holding your power, and restraining it in such a way that you prevent undo harshness. Being gentle doesn’t mean you never raise your voice, it means you know when and how to raise your voice.

Quiet, in this passage, is the Greek word, “hesuchios” which can mean peaceful, steady, settled. But perhaps the most interesting is Strong’s explanation of hesuchios as, “not misusing or overusing words that would stir up needless friction”[iv].

Quiet, here, has nothing to do with noise level. It’s about inner peace and steadiness. It’s about how we use words, not the volume of them.

And maybe specifically (at least for me) how those words are used inside our heads.

One of the ways anxiety has displayed itself in me has been the endless rounds of words. It’s been like every area of concern in my life is linked to a thousand conversations that will probably never happen, but they still loop endlessly in my head.  

Every difficult conversation that happened in real life has a hundred other possible outcomes based on different responses I could have given, and all of them cycle through my mind. The endless feeling of if only I had responded differently, maybe I could have stopped this has been my constant companion.

So there I was in my vehicle that day, repeating the same prayer the whole way to my destination. Gentle my words. Quiet my mind.

And a fascinating thing happened afterward. When I was headed home, the conversations started going around and I began thinking of a dozen different responses I could have had, ways I could have explained things differently, etc… and in a moment of blind panic, I said, “Lord, I asked for a quiet mind!”

And a rush of peace fell in the vehicle and a steady, unchanging thought came to me:

What you gave is enough.

When Scripture says that His strength is made perfect in our weakness[v], when it says that those who seek Him will not want for any good thing[vi], when we’re told that God will keep the minds of those dependent on Him in “perfect peace”[vii], when we’re told that all we need to do is come to Him and He will give us rest[viii], all of these promises of God’s enoughness on our behalf mean that whatever we’ve given, is enough.

Not because I did or said anything perfectly but because it doesn’t matter how well or how poorly I did. I’m not in control of the outcome in anyone else’s life. Just my own. And for me, I was ready and willing to trust God. To trust Him to work in my own life even if I did things wrong, and to trust Him to work in other people’s lives either through me or despite me. He is enough for that, so what I’ve offered is enough.

The endless anxious thoughts didn’t leave that second, but I can tell you something that happened: they lost a lot of their power.

I didn’t have to beat myself up for having them. I didn’t have to try and stop them. I didn’t have to feel guilty for anything I said or didn’t say well—anything I thought of later that might have been a more helpful comment or thought. All I had to do when I caught my mind spiraling into a slew of words or scenarios, was whisper this true thing: what I did was enough. Good or bad, it was enough.

—

The word translated spirit in I Peter 3:4 is pneuma which may seem a tiny bit familiar because it has the same root as our English word pneumonia. That’s because it means, lungs. The place where breath is processed and controlled in our bodies. Our spirit is like our breath—it’s the thing that animates us, what makes us alive.

May we all learn to breathe in these true things.

To breathe in and out gentleness—holding our ground without undue harshness.

To breathe in and out quietness—a steadiness that comes from knowing whatever we’ve offered is enough.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

He’s got it from here. We can simply rest in Him.

[i] I Peter 3:4

[ii] John 8:36

[iii] https://biblehub.com/greek/4239.htm

[iv] https://biblehub.com/greek/2272.htm

[v] 2 Corinthians 12:9

[vi] Psalm 34:10

[vii] Isaiah 26:3

[viii] Matthew 11:28