Your Thoughts Are Loud. God’s Word Is Louder.
Eleven percent of kids between the ages of 3 and 17 currently have a clinical anxiety diagnosis. Among adolescents 12–17, that number jumps to 16 percent. And those are just the ones who’ve been diagnosed.
If you’re a parent right now, none of that surprises you.
On a recent episode of the 226 NextGen Podcast, Youth Pastor Garrett McCord sat down with Executive Pastor Daniel Justice and Kids Ministry Director Teresa Moen to talk honestly about something most of us feel but don’t always have language for — the way anxiety has quietly become the water our kids (and we) are swimming in.
This isn’t a clinical conversation. It’s a pastoral one. And it starts with something Daniel said early in the episode that’s worth sitting with:
“Being anxious is not failure. Feeling distracted is not failure. Feeling stressed is not failure. Those are actually the kindness of God raising a flag — there’s something here we need to address.”
We Live in the Anxious Age
The numbers are real, but the experience is more real. Teresa has been in kids ministry for nearly 20 years. She’s seeing anxiety in first graders now in ways she never did before. Daniel works with adults and watches smart, faithful people get paralyzed by decisions they once would have made without a second thought. Garrett sees it in students every week — kids who know what they’re supposed to believe but whose anxious thoughts feel louder than the voice of God.
Daniel doesn’t blame the pandemic for everything. His read: the pandemic didn’t cause much of anything. It exposed and accelerated what was already there. Isolation made fears bigger. Social media poured fuel on it. And now we’re raising a generation — and living as adults — in a culture where everything feels urgent, every decision feels high-stakes, and the least little thing can make you crumble.
One thing worth naming clearly: feeling anxious doesn’t mean you’re a bad Christian. Teresa put it simply — people are already struggling with anxiety, then add a second layer of guilt, wondering why Jesus isn’t making it go away. That compounding of anxiety plus spiritual shame is its own trap. The goal of this conversation is to help dismantle it.
So What Do You Actually Do?
Daniel offered a three-part framework — not a formula, but a direction. A way of actually using God’s Word to do what we say it does.
1. Slow down.
This one’s first because nothing else works without it. When we say “go to God’s Word and it’ll quiet the noise,” we don’t mean open your Bible app during a 90-second gap in your morning. We mean actually carving out time, removing distractions, and being present.
Daniel’s practical advice: get a physical Bible. Not your phone. The thing you use to read your Bible is also the thing your notifications live on, and you will lose that battle. Garrett mentioned an app called Brick — a tool that physically turns off your phone for a set window of time. Teresa turns hers off. The method doesn’t matter. The point is: you cannot quiet the noise if you never actually get quiet.
This isn’t legalism about Bible-reading habits. It’s an honest acknowledgment that quick fixes don’t address heart issues. A verse-of-the-day habit isn’t going to do what we’re asking Scripture to do. We have to actually change our rhythms.
2. Ask better questions of the text.
Reading Scripture to check a box is different from reading Scripture to be shaped by it. Daniel’s framework for getting more out of any passage — not just the obvious anxiety verses, but any passage:
- What does this tell me about who God is?
- What does this reveal about my own heart?
- Is there a truth here I’m not currently believing or applying?
Garrett shared something from his own sermon prep that landed: when he was studying Jesus appearing first to the women at the tomb, he just started asking questions. Why the women? What does that say about God’s heart? And out of a passage he could have read and moved past in thirty seconds, a whole theology of God’s care for the overlooked opened up.
That’s the move. The Bible was never meant to be skimmed. It’s meant to shape you. And nothing shapes you that you don’t spend time in.
3. Talk back to your thoughts with Scripture.
This is where it gets practical in a specific way. You cannot use Scripture to combat anxiety if you don’t know Scripture. But knowing random verses isn’t quite the point either — the goal is knowing the lies you’re prone to believe and having Scripture ready to answer them.
Garrett brought up a 4th-century monk named Evagrius who went into the desert, cataloged every lie he felt the enemy whisper at him, and then searched Scripture for an answer to each one. He called it a handbook for combating demons. Garrett calls it the most practical spiritual warfare resource most people have never heard of. His suggestion for students — and honestly, for all of us: make your own version. When you notice anxiety rising, ask why. Is it a need for control? Fear of failure? Misplaced hope? Name the lie underneath it, then find the Scripture that answers it directly.
If you’re new to Scripture and don’t know where to start, openbible.info lets you search by topic and returns a list of relevant verses. Start there, then work to understand those verses in context.
What Scripture Doesn’t Do
Daniel closed the conversation with something that might be the most important thing in the whole episode: Scripture won’t make anxiety disappear.
We live in a fallen world. There are things worth being afraid of. Things that are genuinely uncertain. Scripture doesn’t erase any of that. What it does is give you a quiet confidence — a settled awareness that there is something bigger than what you’re facing — so that you can navigate the hard things in healthy ways rather than being crushed by them.
And it only works if it’s a habit. Not a one-time thing. Not a crisis resource you pull out when things get bad—a consistent, practiced, daily returning to the voice of God over your own thoughts.
Garrett ended with Paul’s thorn. We don’t know what it was. We know Paul asked God to take it away, and God said no, not to be cruel, but to build dependence and humility. If you’ve prayed for the anxiety to lift and haven’t gotten a yes yet, hear this: God is not distant. He is not ignoring you. If your struggle is pushing you back to him, it is working exactly as he intends. As Garrett put it, borrowing from Spurgeon: “I’ve learned to kiss the wave that crashes me against the Rock of Ages.”
Listen to the Full Conversation
Episode 014 of the 226 NextGen Podcast is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
If something in this episode connects and you want to talk it through — how to actually use Scripture this way, where to start, what this looks like in community — reach out. Garrett, Daniel, and Teresa are here and would love to sit down with you.
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Let’s raise the next generation with wisdom and courage.
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