It’s hard to scroll through the news—or your own group chat—without feeling like the world is spiraling. Your job is unstable. Your relationship feels off. Your faith is full of questions. You’re stressed, tired and teetering on burnout. And yet, when you try to explain it, the best word you can come up with is: “chaotic.”
That’s exactly the kind of moment Dr. Manny Arango wrote Crushing Chaos for. A pastor, theologian and self-professed Bible nerd, Arango’s new book argues that the Christian life isn’t about avoiding chaos—it’s about naming it, understanding it and conquering it.
And if that sounds dramatic, that’s because it is. In the best way.
“I don’t believe the serpent was just there to bring sin into the world,” Arango told RELEVANT. “It was there to bring chaos.”
In his research, Arango dove deep into the Eastern context of Genesis, where creation stories often centered around a chaos dragon. That’s not just mythology—it’s a metaphor.
“The authors and audience of the Bible were familiar with gods like Marduk or Baal who had to battle chaos monsters,” he said. “In that world, if there wasn’t a dragon in Genesis, that would actually be weird. Chaos was the enemy.”
Which flips the usual Western reading of Eden on its head. For Arango, the real threat in the garden wasn’t just sin. It was disordered living—chaos invading the design God called “good.” And if that’s true, then maybe the real spiritual battle isn’t about being more moral. It’s about being more ordered.
“We keep labeling everything as sin,” he said. “But there are things that are chaotic and destructive that aren’t necessarily sinful. And because we don’t have the language for it, we don’t know how to deal with it.”
Take anxiety, for example. It’s not a sin. But it can be soul-disrupting. The problem isn’t that you’re morally failing—it’s that your life might be disordered.
“Peace isn’t magic,” Arango said. “Peace is what happens when things are in order. And God’s solution to anxiety is order.”
That distinction matters, especially in the church.
“I’ve been in so many services where we pray for people to have peace,” he said, “but they aren’t able to sustain peace—because what they really need is order. Order is God’s solution to all forms of chaos.”
In Crushing Chaos, Arango outlines seven forms of order—things like sequence, rhythm and hierarchy. And yes, he acknowledges that “order” isn’t the sexiest concept. But that’s the problem.
“We want the outcome,” he said, “but not the process.”
So we pray for peace, but we resist putting things in their right place.
“The reality is that when I get order in my life, I do get peace. And actually, I get peace that surpasses understanding,” he said. “Most people don’t want to do the work to get order into their lives, because order is hard. It takes structure. It takes prioritization.”
One of the most important elements of that order, Arango says, is sequence—what comes first. And for many of us, things are out of order from the start.
“I’d talk to young adults struggling with anxiety, and I’d start asking questions about their lives,” he said. “It would become really obvious that God’s not the number one thing. That their relationships were disordered. That their emotions were at the top instead of their mind. And whenever things are out of order, you’re not going to have peace.”
Still, Arango isn’t just theorizing. He’s lived this. In the book, he shares how a therapist helped him understand the enmeshed relationship he had with his mother growing up, after his father—a drug addict—was incarcerated.
“There was nothing sinful about it,” he said. “But it was insanely chaotic. No one in church had language for that. No pastor ever told me, ‘This is unhealthy.’ I needed a therapist to say it. But pastors should be masters of the soul.”
This is where Arango’s frustration with the modern church model flares.
“We’ve turned pastors into brand managers and CEOs,” he said. “But the pastor’s job is to be a nerd who knows how to deal with people’s inner lives. It’s to take the theology and actually help someone fix their soul.”
Which brings us to the idols.
For Arango, one of the major ways Christians invite chaos into their lives is through unchecked idolatry—especially the kind we don’t realize we have.
“Anything you can’t sacrifice is an idol,” he said. “Food’s not a sin, but we fast to remind ourselves it’s not our god. Alcohol’s not a sin, but if you can’t give it up, it might be a god. Same with relationships, success, your image. We say we love God most, but when it comes down to it, we’re unwilling to put those other things on the altar.”
Idolatry, in other words, is misprioritized love. And misprioritized love creates chaos.
So how do you spot chaos before it explodes your life? Arango breaks it down into four relationships: with God, with yourself, with others and with your work. When one is fractured, you feel it. But when multiple are off at once? That’s when everything starts spinning.
“We talk a lot about being right with God,” he said. “But what about being right with yourself? Or your job? Or your friendships?”
He argues that when your heart and your mind are at odds, when your will is sabotaging your purpose, when your calendar doesn’t reflect your values—that’s all chaos. And naming it is the first step to crushing it.
Still, what if you’re just tired? What if you’ve accepted the world is chaotic and you’ve made your peace with it?
To that, Arango gets fired up.
“We’ve told people that Eden was perfect,” he said. “But the Bible never says that. God called it good. And good doesn’t mean easy. Good means functional. The dragon in the garden wasn’t a glitch. It was the challenge humanity was made for. God didn’t give us a sanitized paradise—He gave us something to subdue.”
Which reframes our modern frustration. Life isn’t broken because it’s hard. Life is working as designed. You were made to work with God to bring order to the chaos.
If that feels daunting, Arango has one last word of encouragement.
“Humans are brilliant at solving problems. Elon Musk can get to Mars. You can talk to your mom. You’ve got this.”
And maybe that’s the real takeaway. Crushing chaos isn’t about becoming hyper-disciplined or spiritually elite. It’s about realizing you were built for this.
“The goal isn’t perfection,” Arango said. “It’s wholeness. It’s peace that comes from things being in their right place. That’s what God’s offering. Not escape—but alignment.”
