Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jeff Parrott.

Around 10 years ago, an online tool promised relief to people suffering from anxiety.

The tool was called Anxiety Box. Here's how it worked.

You'd register with your name and email and then list the things causing you anxiety.

A stressful job, a rocky relationship, a vague sense of uncertainty, whatever it is, you would let

Anxiety Box know about it. Over time, Anxiety Box

would send you emails with prompts about your anxiety so that you could see the source of

your worry right there in your inbox and proceed to therapeutically delete it into the trash.

The idea is this, if you could see your anxiety and then delete it

from your email, perhaps in some way it'd also be deleted from your life. Here's how the original website

pitched itself. When you're anxious, your anxiety spams your mind and leads to a condition known as procrastinatory, shame, despair.

We take over and send you anxious, urgent, deeply upsetting emails.

Delete the emails and poof, the anxiety goes away.

Relief is here if you want it.

Now, it's a clever idea, isn't it? Just come face to face with your anxiety, put it in the trash, and poof, make it go away. Relief is possible through

the tactic of removal. In a loud and busy world, we might wonder if something like the

deleting power of anxiety box

just might be the antidote for our affliction. But is the cure for our anxiety just a matter of seeing it

and deleting it? Is the ultimate goal the pursuit of relief or the pursuit of something different, something more?

These questions arise in our passage today in the first half of 2nd Kings chapter 19.

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