Anxious thoughts are an everyday reality for many women. In Take Heart: God’s Comfort for Anxious Thoughts, debut author Lindsay Hausch’s real-life struggles speak to the heart of this topic. With the voice of experience and the power of God’s grace, Hausch assures readers that overcoming anxious thoughts is not as simple as having enough faith or praying enough. Instead, that struggle can be a training ground for spiritual growth and a deeper understanding of God’s love for you.
“When our anxiety makes us feel stalked by fear, dizzy with doubt, and hemmed in by our own hurtful thoughts, God can draw us to Himself and lead us to safety, not once, but every time it happens,” writes Hausch. “As we seek Him moment by moment, in the vortex of life’s disappointments, distractions, and the anxieties that result, God perfects our faith through His grace. It is always enough.”
Lindsay Hausch is here to remind you that our God meets us where we are. In this women’s small-group study, be enriched with the truth of the Lord and know that His power is made perfect in weakness. “This resource will help the reader cultivate a more grace-filled perspective of herself while encouraging her to cultivate a faith community where she can be transparent with other women. Ultimately, it reminds her of God’s radical grace for her messy heart,” says Hausch.
For more information about Take Heart: God’s Comfort for Anxious Thoughts, visit cph.org/takeheart, or contact Lindsey Scheetz at lindsey.sheetz@cph.org.
About the Author
Lindsay Hausch loves mentoring women; supporting and partnering with her husband, a full-time pastor; and staying at home with her three littles in Rocklin, CA. In her cracks of free time, she devours books and wrestles to write meaningful words. Follow her journey at lindsayhausch.com.
Praise for Take Heart
Lindsay has a gift for putting feelings into words in humorous, relatable ways that can pierce our defenses and denials of our own feelings. Her refreshing openness about her struggles with feeling “not enough” helps us identify with her and with the biblical people she illuminates. Lindsay helps us confront the truth about our ongoing need for hope and grace, pointing us to Scripture and to Jesus’ words and example for a path forward with God and within a trusted community. I needed to hear this again! Thank you, Lindsay!
—Diane Bahn, presenter, coach, PLI Learning Community coordinator
This book reads like a meaningful conversation with a best friend over coffee—a best friend who sees your struggles and identifies with the toiling of anxiety. Lindsay captures the exhaustion and vulnerability of anxiety while offering reassuring hope. Take Heart is relatable and accurate, with a loving, pointed reminder that our weakness is made strong in a God who seeks my unfaltering reliance on Him.
—Jessica Brashear, school counselor and director of the school counseling program at Concordia University, Nebraska
I am delighted that Lindsay has written about the ever-nagging emotion of anxiety. She comes beside the reader as a trusted and empathetic friend and mingles Scripture with her own story. Her book is a warm and inviting look into anxiety as it impacts our closest relationships. She leads the reader to ponder that anxiety has a redemptive and hopeful quality that God uses in other’s lives. She spends the first section of her book laying out God’s transforming love in the midst of our anxiety. The pauses between chapters for study and reflection are thoughtful and get at the heart of anxiety.
—Lisa Lessing, counselor and retreat leader
Many Christians wrestle daily with insecurity, perfectionism, and worry, and some experience seasons or a lifelong battle with anxiety and depression. Take Heart walks a beautiful balance of deep honesty about these struggles and the celebration of God’s constant love, grace, and presence. Hausch doesn’t dismiss the daily impact of anxiety and worry. Instead, she leans into how God can powerfully use it to direct us back to Christ and then into service to each other. This study doesn’t give easy answers. Instead, it opens up important conversations and points us to God’s Word and Sacrament for hope.
—Julianna Shults, program manager, LCMS Youth Ministry
In her book, Take Heart: God’s Comfort for Anxious Thoughts, Lindsay Hausch reminds us that we are not alone. She tells of the importance of connection with both God and with the people that He has placed in our lives as a means of comfort and support. While painting a beautiful canvas of God’s love for us, Lindsay gives us modern tools for coping with daily stressors: God, people, rest, and the courage to be vulnerable. For anyone who struggles with anxious thoughts, this is a must-read!
—Nancy Barton, counselor, Lifeline Professional Counseling Services
Hausch imparts meaning, hope, and authenticity by sharing her journey while relying on grace during her most tangled moments with anxiety. Anxiety is not uncommon when we become overwhelmed by unexpected challenges we believe we have little control over. Reading Take Heart felt warm, peaceful, and gentle. Hausch shows how unnecessary it is to conceal our brokenness, because we do not need to be perfect or to refine our preparedness, because expectations will likely not match reality. Each chapter concludes with thoughts, verses for reflection, relevant questions, and a valuable, applicable activity for turning negative, weighted baggage into a toolbox for showing Christ’s love to a world that is just as broken as we are.
—Marie Seltz, Candescent Counseling and Coaching
Anxiety is so often kept shushed as a private issue or disparaged as a lack of faith, and so it is wonderful that Lindsay Hausch has fought through her own life circumstances to bring the topic to the table for open, hope-filled conversation. For many believers, anxiety is a staccato spiral that forms the background soundtrack to their everyday attempts to “get it all together.” Lindsay offers an understanding, sympathetic perspective and meets the noise of anxiety, beat for beat, with a steadying rhythm of grace and the resounding truth of who we are in Christ Jesus.
—Kristina Paul, deaconess, director of Care and Women’s Ministries, Salem Lutheran Church and School
Packed with relatable, personal insight and a deep grasp of God’s Word, this study fills you up without weighing you down. Lindsay speaks deeply and directly to anxious hearts. She meets participants in the realities of anxiety, equips you to reflect and to do the work of wrestling with your fears, and then invites you—at every turn—to rest in the finished and forever work of Jesus. This study is such a timely, compassionate, and truly helpful resource.
—Matt Popovits, pastor, author of Tough Call: A Little Book on Making Big Decisions
