Healing from Anxiety

I have believed in God for as long as I can remember but I didn’t start exploring my faith until a couple of years ago.

I wasn’t really sure why going to church was important and I wasn’t really sure organised religion was for me, but in the Autumn of 2014 I started attending my local church of England church. I liked it and the people but it was yet to make a real impact on my life and I didn’t really find it helped me, in a practical sense, to live my life well.

I had spent almost 15 years living with Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Winter 2014 to Summer 2015 was a really difficult time for me as I began to suffer from severe insomnia and depression. I began to feel ambivalent towards God because I thought I would have to spend my whole life fighting this illness.

I had never heard of anyone being completely cured by God of their mental health problem so I didn’t even know that this was something that I could pray for, I think my prayers at that time were more along the lines of ‘please help me!’

A few weeks after I started praying again, I started to feel a bit more hopeful, I started reading from a little ‘Book of Bible Promises’ that someone had given me and I signed up for a free daily Bible text message service.

A couple of weeks further on, I met someone at a local event who encouraged me to consider attending Huntingdonshire Community Church. I started going and I was encouraged by how friendly everyone was and how the teaching seemed more relatable and meaningful than what I had previously encountered.

I was starting to feel more trustful and so I signed up to do the Alpha course that Autumn. I was also experiencing an incredible level of physical and mental healing by this time; after 15 years my Generalised Anxiety Disorder had finally gone away; including the insomnia, depression and all the physical symptoms.

God had set me free. I felt this freedom in all areas of my life; I was physically and mentally free, but also free to relate to other people better, free to find a more fulfilling career and free to have a relationship with God.