Fear, Faith, and Social Skills – 6/22/25

In his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot utilizes stream of consciousness to enable his modern character to wander the streets of London, lost in his social anxieties. Prufrock is a middle-aged man who struggles with loneliness and self-loathing. He is wrestling with how to introduce himself to people, especially women. He suggests,

“There will be time, there will time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”

To “prepare a face” is to put on a mask. Prufrock is assuming that if people see who he truly is, they will reject him, so he has to put on a mask (i.e. “prepare a face”). He ruminates and ponders what to do:

“And time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea.”

He asks himself,

“To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)”

So Prufrock’s inner dialogue includes role playing, imagining what people are noticing about him (his bald spot), and what conclusions they come to (aging). So he wonders if social interactions are even worth it:

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

“But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter—”

So he’s imagining himself socially beheaded like John the Baptist.

“I am no prophet— and here’s no great matter
I’ve seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.”

So Prufrock is fearful. His life is passing, and he is socially debilitated by fear. Several paragraphs later, he articulates his frustration in a sentence:

“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”

So many thoughts, so many fears. Elliot ends this dramatic monologue with Prufrock’s vivid lines:

“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

The sea girls are mermaids. Prufrock is confessing that sometimes it is easier to have relationships with the imaginary beings in his head than the actual people in his life.

“Human voices wake us, and we drown.”

Eliot finished this poem in 1911, long before the internet, long before the “age of loneliness.” Yet he captures so many of the personal and social struggles of our day. Consider today just a few of the social trends:

1. The breakdown of marriage and family. Historically, social skills were more caught than taught within traditional family relationships. As these relationships decline, social proficiency seems to be declining as well.
2. The anti-socialization of high school students. Dating, hanging out, and working are all in decline among high school students. Ryan Burge, who is a political science professor who analyzes trends, concludes, “The data about the social lives of high school students is incredibly bleak and honestly makes me very worried for the next generation.” Interestingly, church attending high schoolers tend to be stronger socially.
3. The investment in social skills. As AI plays an increasingly significant role in many workplaces, it is a little ironic that companies are spending more now on social skill training. Harpar’s Bazaar published an article earlier this month entitled, “Why Are Gen-Z and Millennial Workers Obsessed with ‘Soft Skills’ in the Workplace?” Perhaps as machines do more, humans are realizing we need to know more of what it means to be human.

As well as the practical benefits, like Eliana Goldstein points out (she is a career coach),

“Investing in soft skills [e.g. empathy, communication, leadership] will not only help companies be more successful, it will help in terms of employee retention.”

These trends (and we could talk about a lot more) are interesting, but for followers of Jesus, improving social skills is inseparably linked to the gospel. Jesus did not die to create individuals who were on a solo trip to heaven. He died to create a new people, a body, a family, a church. Although he saves us and transforms us one person at a time, he always does it in community.

This is a core part of our church purpose statement. We are called to “believe God’s word, connect with God’s family, share God’s story.” Connect with his family. That is not easy, nor is it easy to stay connected with one another. So we, this summer, are asking the Spirit, through his word, to grow us in skillfulness so that we can more effectively fulfill his calling in our lives.

The prophet Jeremiah knew what it was like to struggle socially. God had called him to a unique ministry at a unique time that put him at odds with his family and with his neighbors. Jeremiah was called by God in 626 B.C. during the reign of King Josiah of Judah.

He ministered for more than 40 years and experienced at least four cataclysmic international events: the fall of the Assyrian Empire, the rise of the Babylonian Empire, the defeat of Egypt at Carchemish, and the fall of Jerusalem. Each of these events was earth-shaking, life-altering, and yet God called Jeremiah to fearlessly proclaim his word right in the middle of social-political upheaval. And Jeremiah felt socially and linguistically unprepared. Look at this in Jeremiah 1:6-8:

“…’Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.’ But the Lord said to me, ‘Do not say, “I am only a youth”; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the Lord.’”

Here, God is the ultimate speech therapist. His presence (“I am with you”) has social implications.

But as Jeremiah pleaded with Judah to return to the Lord, they not only rejected the Lord, but they despised Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 15:10, he complained to the lord and his mother,

“Woe is me, my mother, that you bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land! I have not lent, nor have I borrowed, yet all of them curse me.”

Jeremiah is struggling with several things. First of all, self-pity: “Woe is me.”

Second, he’s struggling with despair. He wishes he had not been born. It’s like he’s saying to his mother, “What were you thinking?”

Then he’s struggling with loneliness. He feels alienated from the people he loves.

When he says, “I have not lent, nor have I borrowed,” lending and borrowing are typical sources of conflict. If you want to fracture a family, throw money in the mix. Jeremiah is saying, “I haven’t done the normal things that would cause people to despise me, and yet they do.”

God assures him that he will vindicate him and bring about good, and Jeremiah starts a new diet plan,

“Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and a delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O Lord, God of hosts” (Jeremiah 15:16).

As Jeremiah continues to wrestle with this difficult social calling and the stubbornness of the people, he begins to learn the true source of security and satisfaction.

In Jeremiah 17:5-8, God graphically contrasts to Jeremiah two ways of being in the world: a way of cursing and a way of blessing. We want to spend some time walking through these two ways, and then we’ll spend a good deal of time trying to understand the social implications of these two ways.

1. Cursed is the man who trusts in man.

Look at verse five.

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord’” (Jeremiah 17:5).

Jeremiah is recording God’s assessment of this unfavorable, unblessed condition, a cursed condition. The unfavorable condition is when I am putting my trust in people, making people (e.g. “flesh”) my strength. When they’re happy with me, I’m happy. When they’re upset at me, I’m upset. My heart turns from the Lord to trust in people, and no amount of cars, no amount of houses, no amount of money or vacations can compensate for living in this state.

Jeremiah communicates God’s illustration of what this life is like, the unfavorable comparison:

“He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land” (Jeremiah 17:6).

Three characteristics of this unfavorable comparison: Trusting in man leads to, first, a stunted existence. Stunted, like a shrub, shriveled and runtish, lacking in nutrients of goodness.

2. Trusting in man leads to a parched place, a parched life.

That word “parched” in the Hebrew comes from a word that means “burned,” like the heat has scorched the shrub and life has become arid and dry, lifeless, lacking in vital nutrients. Trusting a man, thirdly, leads to an uninhabited place, a salt land, lonely, socially impoverished. When our confidence is in people, we will eventually, inevitably, be disappointed, and actually, it leads to greater isolation.

Nick Trenton introduces us to a woman named Jamie. Jamie “hates small talk” and finds socializing difficult. For example, right after a Zoom meeting with colleagues and supervisors,

“she finds herself lightheaded, on edge, and unable to settle down to anything for the rest of the day. For a few moments she even feels tearful and then suddenly angry. She tries to focus on her work, but she can’t help returning to a moment in the meeting when she was asked a question. She replays the awkward moment in her mind over and over again. Was she too flustered? Could everyone tell she was nervous? Why did she say what she did instead of something clearer, more intelligent, smoother? Why did she have to be such an idiot and mispronounce the word ‘epitome’? When the supervisor remarked that it was ‘time to cut to the chase,’ was he actually referring to her? Did they all think she talked too much? Did she ramble? Was her answer really unsophisticated, or worse— did it hurt someone’s feelings? Cross a line? Why was everyone quiet for a few seconds after she spoke?”

On one level, Jamie is struggling with a classic case of post-event rumination, when our brains keep replaying social interactions over and over again with a stunning ability to focus on the negative and magnify the trivial into something colossal. To different degrees, I think most all of us understand what that is like. But beneath these brain battles, something is happening in Jamie’s very active heart.

Why is she so anxious about what her co-workers think of her? Why is she terrified of making a social mistake or experiencing relational awkwardness? Why does all of this feel so threatening that she can’t even focus on her work? We could answer on several different levels. I want to go to the deepest level.

Proverbs 29:25 provides the essential answer:

“The fear of man lays a snare [a trap], but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.”

Say that with me, “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” That Hebrew word “safe” refers to being securely on high, inaccessible in the sense of being beyond the reach of human harm. This is where God is taking Jeremiah, and this is one of the differences between a life of cursing and a life of blessing: cursed is the man who trusts in man, blessed is the one who trusts the Lord.

Look at the favorable condition, this place of favor:

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:7).

When we relocate our reliance from man to God, we are exchanging a life of cursing for a life of blessing.

Look at the analogy God uses to communicate this blessing, this favorable comparison:

“He is like a tree [not a shrub] planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit” (Jeremiah 17:8).

The blessed person is like a tree planted by water. Notice the three characteristics:

1. It’s rooted, not shallow, not superficial. It “sends its roots by the stream” (Jeremiah 17:8). The one who trusts in the Lord is tapping into promises that are deeper than personal feelings, deeper than public opinion.

2. The blessed person is stable, not vacillating with circumstances or seasonal changes. The second part of verse eight says, “and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green.” Seasons of dryness are not threatening. Relational tensions and awkwardness, though not enjoyable, are not devastating. Stable.

3. Fruitful is the third one, not sterilized by adversity or rejection. The last part of verse eight says,

“And is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”

Love, joy, and peace continue to emerge even when circumstances and relationships are dry and difficult. This is not theory for Jeremiah.

He knew what it was like to allow his difficult circumstances and strained relationships to shut him down and for him to feel alienated from God. He complained to God in chapter 15 that God is like a different kind of stream, not this kind of stream.

“Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” (Jeremiah 15:18b)

Jeremiah is saying, “I was in a season of dryness and difficulty and feeling alienated from people and from you, and I looked to you and you were to me like a mirage. You didn’t come through for me quickly enough.” Jeremiah knows that kind of dryness and those kinds of doubts, but something is beginning to change. He is maturing. He is learning that this kind of rootedness and stability and fruitfulness is not a quick fix, but is a long-term different way of living from cursing to blessing.

In light of this, I want us to wrestle with one question: How does transferring our trust from people to God enable us to grow in social skills and relational wisdom? Let me suggest three things.

1. We shift from technique to trust and love. Developing social skills for a Christian, as I mentioned earlier, is far more than improving tactics. Hopefully we all want to grow in social skillfulness, but technique alone can devolve into a kind of manipulation where we’re just trying to impress or get people to do what we want them to do.

After describing how Christians can differ on debatable issues, Paul prays this prayer (and this is a great prayer for this whole series),

“May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Romans 15:5-7).

How has Christ welcomed me? I was a sinner, his enemy, opposed to everything righteousness is and stands for. I wanted nothing to do with him. He gave his son to love me to himself. Now, based on that kind of love, Paul is saying, you interact with one another, you welcome one another with the kind of love with which you have been welcomed.

So everything we’re talking about here (social skillfulness) flows from the gospel of Jesus transforming our hearts so that we can learn a new way of interacting with one another, welcoming one another. The way we welcome one another is inseparably linked to the gospel of Jesus and the glory of God. We cannot be a church who adores God on Sunday and avoids one another on Tuesday. We cannot. So we shift from technique to trust and love.

2. When we transfer our trust from people to God, we begin to see how anxiety diminishes social wisdom. I want to give three examples of that because, like in Jeremiah 17, anxiety tends to dry us up, shrivel us up, and shut us down. Three examples of this:

 

• Anxiety tends to turn us inward. Like Jamie, who had trouble focusing on her work because she was lost in her head, it shrinks and shrivels up our world like the shrub in Jeremiah 17. It’s hard to be fully present when our minds are distracted by worry. Having said that, please understand, if you’re in the middle of a season of anxiety, no, I’m not speaking this for you to feel guilty. All of us will walk through seasons of anxiety. But as we do that, we’re praying that God will open our eyes more and more—as we learned in our anxiety series a year ago—to the lies that anxiety preaches. Anxiety preaches lies. Lies like promising things it cannot deliver, and lies like people are thinking things about you they’re probably not thinking. As David Foster Wallace has said,

“You will worry less about what people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

We’re seeing examples of how anxiety diminishes social wisdom.

• Social anxiety can disciple us into developing “safety” strategies. Safety strategies are things we do when we’re not willing to face our fears; we’re actually feeding them. For example, anxiety sends up a false alarm. Now, to be clear, sometimes anxiety (especially if you’re in an abusive relationship) is sending out an actual alarm that you need to respond to. But often, anxiety sends up false alarms of perceived threats, and we take action almost without even thinking.

Here are a few of the safety-seeking behaviors that are common. These are things that feed fear rather than face fear.

• • Medicating anxiety by abusing alcohol or drugs. That’s a common one.
  • Excessive screen time. There are many families who cannot be in the same room without the television on or faces in screens, or they would actually have to talk (horrific as that might be). Fear of silence causes these safety-seeking behaviors. Or it may not be just fear of silence. It could be fear of transparency or having to communicate.
  • Avoiding eye contact to evade perceived judgment or fear of being watched.
  • Withdrawing from relationships or social settings. At times when we do that, we replace real relationships with imaginary ones, like Prufrock’s mermaids. Today, we do this often through excessive video game use (like actually living in a false reality) or things like porn.
  • Overworking, feeling like it’s safer and more fulfilling to just work more than actually have to relate to people.
  • Pre-programming and rehearsing conversations for fear of uncertainty or spontaneity. Think of Prufrock, prepare a face to meet the faces.

In a message in April, I mentioned Robert Hanssen, who was one of our country’s most ruinous spies. When he was in prison, psychiatrist David Charney interviewed Hanson one night and wrote this:

“Hanssen explained that he actually had to deal with social situations by having preset stories and conversations. Like people who, as soon as you meet them, they start telling you jokes. He could be funny and charming in a sort of programmed way. But he could not be with someone for two hours in a row, because he would run out of stories.”

Programming conversations or over-relying on prefabricated jokes or cliches function as safety strategies.

Little qualifier: Preparing for conversations is different from programming them. Preparing for conversations can be a good thing: praying for humility and love, maybe thinking of some good questions you can ask, committing not to funnel (making it all about you). Those kind of preparations can be really helpful as you go into a conversation. Preparing is different from programming, where we are so afraid of being asked something we don’t know the answer to or having an awkward social moment that we actually script the conversation as much as we can in order to control it as a safety strategy.

There are more safety-seeking behaviors. Things like anger can be one (where we keep people at a distance), defensiveness, even excessive politeness can be one.

Let me give you one more example of how anxiety diminishes social wisdom: Anxiety is contagious. It’s contagious, it’s transmissible, more than COVID. A few months ago, the elders were discussing the difference between anxious and non-anxious leadership and the way it affects churches or other organizations. As a part of that discussion, we talked about Joe Carter’s example of an anxious family system. This is a very mundane example, but watch how anxiety spreads.

“A project you’ve been working on at work fails, and your boss holds you responsible. Feeling frustrated and anxious about the implications for your career, you show up at home visibly tense. Your wife notices your mood, but when she asks about it, you avoid sharing any details [kind of blow her off]. Sensing the tension, your wife becomes irritable and snaps at your teenage daughter for not having finished her chores. Your daughter, in turn, gets upset, retreats to her room, feeling unfairly targeted. She then vents her frustration on her younger brother, criticizing him for playing his music too loudly. This leads to an argument between the siblings.” At this point, the fish is getting nervous.

The point is not to back up and think, “Oh, I just have to get a job without any tension.” Maybe, but it’s almost impossible to avoid all tension. Relational wisdom learns over time how to process our anxiety and to be open and honest with those we’re in a relationship with, so that we can work together rather than spread the contagion. By the way, on a positive note, peace is also contagious. Number two, we begin to see how anxiety diminishes social wisdom.

3. When we transfer our trust from people to God, we experience more courage to grow relationally. As we grow in confidence in God, we will be more willing to try to fail, to risk awkwardness and rejection, and to continue growing in relational wisdom.

Many Sundays, right before I step up to teach, I will hear thoughts—not always, but often—like, “This is going to flop.” “You’re not prepared.” “This is not going to help anyone.” “What are you doing teaching? You’re not even qualified.” And other encouraging thoughts. At that point, I have learned that if I try to logically engage with those thoughts, I end up getting stuck in my head and the prophecies that they are preaching end up being fulfilled. I’m not present, I’m not focused on God, I am lost in my heart. So what really helps me—I know there’s a time to examine qualifications, there’s a time to prepare, all of that—but at that point, it’s time to concede.

I concede to those perceived fears by saying this: “True, I am unqualified.” That’s why Jesus died. He died because I’m not qualified, not just to preach but to do anything in and of myself. He paid for all my sin so I could live in the righteousness of Christ and use the gifts He gave me imperfectly, but freely by his grace. “Well, it still could flop.” True, but what if it’s not about me? What if it is not about preaching a perfect sermon or somehow accomplishing my goals? What if God wants to glorify his name through my sermonic flop? Am I in for that? And I’m like, “Okay, God.” Because that’s a great test of motives, isn’t it? Like, why am I really doing this? It’s like, “God, this is not my preferred mode, but if you want to glorify your name through this teaching flopping, then I’m in.” And you know the freedom that comes from that? Because suddenly, my trust is shifting from myself and even from your perception (from people) to God. Here we go. Fly or flop. We’re in.

As I’m doing that, the Spirit of God always brings to mind promises, like this one that happened recently: “Some trust in chariots and some trust in horses—” Some trust preaching ability, some trust singing ability, some trust your ability to manage your business, or your ability to navigate, whatever. “…but we trust in the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7). That’s where our hope is. We’re not trusting in people. We’re trusting in God.

“In the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence—” Isn’t that so ironic? I think if I’m humbling myself, acknowledging my inability, then I’m not going to have any confidence. And the opposite happened. As I put my faith in him and stand in awe of God, then I get confidence from the Spirit of God to do whatever he calls me to do. “…and his children will have a refuge” (Proverbs 14:26). That kind of confidence is contagious, and it gets passed down.

This is one of my favorites:

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

So whatever are linguistic or relational or based on past hurt or all these things that we think of as debilitating weaknesses— when we come to Christ and we relocate our trust from people to God, he works in and through our weaknesses to display his. This is what Jeremiah meant when he said,

“Your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” (Jeremiah 15:16).

So each week, as we get down beneath the social skills, we do want to come back up and work on some of the implications. Let me give you one social skill we want to take away from today.

This week, if we could all pray about facing and replacing safety strategies. So as you go through your week, and all of us are different, but you will notice when you get in awkward situations or you’re not wanting to be in a particular conversation— that is a false fear. You’re going to be tempted to turn in certain directions to evade that. Face that, acknowledge that, be willing to name that, talk about it, and then replace that by turning to God for help to grow. Lord, what does it look like for me to trust you now, and how does that change the way I interact with my neighbor, how I communicate? Let’s talk to God about that now.

Father, you know that some of these reactions we have in awkward or uncomfortable situations are not things we even think about. Many of them are such a part of us, we don’t even know we’re doing them. We want to pull away or shut down, or escape and be distracted, or a myriad of other responses. We’re asking for your Spirit’s help, first of all, that we would notice, not in a debilitating way, but to be honest.

Then, even more importantly, that we could transfer our trust from what people think of us (which can be a trap) to you. As we do that, we can cast our cares on you and our anxieties and fears, and we can spread love rather than tension, we can have hard conversations without fear, and we don’t have to pretend to always know the answers. Please, Lord, there are a hundred implications of this that we can experience today, this week. We’re asking for your help so that we, your people, can love God and love our neighbor as we have been loved through Jesus. We pray in his name, amen.