In the spring of 2004, David McCloud and his wife were newlyweds sitting on a plane at the Greenville-Spartanburg airport in South Carolina, waiting to fly to Charlotte and then home to Miami. The cockpit came on: there is a problem with the aircraft, everybody off, we are putting you on a bus to Charlotte.
He was furious. The whole day was ruined. His wife told him kindly that it would be fine, and he stayed annoyed anyway.
The next day he was at his desk in Miami when his father called and asked whether he had seen the news. A plane leaving Charlotte for Greenville had gone down. Someone he knew was on it. It was the same aircraft they had been asked to get off of — a divider in the luggage compartment that keeps bags from shifting was broken, so the weight would not stay where it belonged. The plane was flown empty to Charlotte, repaired, so they thought, and put back on that short hop the next morning.
For years afterward he sweated every time he boarded a plane.
David is a licensed counselor who has spent two decades listening to people describe what they are afraid of, and he says what happened to him there is close to universal. Something happens to you, and afterward you live out of it. It need not be a plane. It can be a stretch of financial ruin you never want to face again, or a person you trusted who betrayed you — and now every relationship you form is quietly filtered through that one.
Written from a prison
Do not be anxious about anything. Read cold, that sounds like a switch you should be able to flip. If it were, none of us would need this.
Consider where Paul is standing when he writes it. Almost certainly a Roman prison — not a white-collar environment, and not a blue-collar one either. A hard, dangerous, infectious place. And he is there because he served God, which raises the question you would raise: how does God let one of his own end up here, alongside people who actually earned the cell? Did he stop caring?
From inside that, Paul writes: Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
The painting in his office
Years ago a woman David had counseled painted him a picture, and it hangs in his office. If you did not know what it was, it would not hold you long: gnarled trees, an unhappy green, nobody in it at all. They are olive trees. It is what she imagined the garden of Gethsemane looked like.
Jesus goes there to pray on the night before the cross — the same word Paul uses, supplication, requests brought and laid down. And what happens to him there is physical. He sweats as though he were bleeding. He knows what is coming: not only the nails, but the full weight of God's wrath falling on the one person who never sinned, and the tearing of a communion with the Father that had never once been broken. His friends cannot stay awake for it.
Let this cup pass from me. He was afraid. He never sinned, and he was afraid — his body reacting the way a body reacts to something unbearable coming toward it. And then he purposed to go anyway, because there was no other way, and because what waited on the other side of it was you.
That is the ground Paul stands on in that cell. Not a man whose circumstances improved — a man whose future is secured by somebody else's obedience, which makes the prison an episode instead of an ending.
Where yours comes from
Some anxiety is rooted in something that genuinely happened to you. David lost his younger brother suddenly, seven and a half years ago; his nephews were five, four, and eight months old. To this day, when his mother calls at an hour he is not expecting, his body tenses before he answers — because one night she called and told him his brother was gone. A good dad, full of plans, and then not. He does not pretend to know why.
Other anxiety is not about trauma at all. It is about control — the school we have to get into, the promotion we have to have, all of it held with white knuckles because we are living as though this world is our permanent address.
So he offered an order to work in. Name what the stress actually is. Dig for its root, because knowing where it came from is what lets you pray about it honestly. Face it, rather than assuming a Christian should not feel it. Deliver it — hand it to God the way Jesus did in that garden, out loud, with the feeling still attached. Then preach the gospel to yourself, back through the cross, until you remember he went through that on your behalf.
Row 32C
In 2018, David was flying that same Charlotte route with his daughter Madison when the plane started circling. Thirty minutes became forty-five. He asked a flight attendant whether something was wrong, and she said yes — the landing gear will not come down, and we are up here until they talk us down.
They circled an hour and a half. He asked, from the back, how much fuel they had, as if the flight deck had been waiting on him. And somewhere in there he saw what he was doing: trying to fly the plane from seat 32C. Which is what most of us do with our lives. We grip controls we do not have, then wonder why we are exhausted.
So he went back through the gospel, the whole way through, and found he could say: if this is the last day, I am a child of God, and my future rests on his work, not mine.
You cannot add one day to your life. That is not a threat; it is a relief, if the one holding the calendar is the one who went to the cross for you. You can tell how much someone loves you by what they were willing to endure for you.
So whatever you carried in today, put it down at his feet. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice.
