Worry

I'm reading Come Thirsty by Max Lucado (yes, again--it's a great book).  It's funny, his books always sound like they're about one thing and end up giving me a sense of being really about something else...or a bunch of something elses.  But I read them over and over--one day, it will all sink in, right?

I was listening to the audio version in the car yesterday and he started talking about worrying and how pointless it is.  He said that 40% of what we worry about never happens.  30% is about things in our past that we can't change.  12% is about what others think of us that can't be controlled.  10% is about our health (which is made worse when we worry) and 8% is about real stuff that we can do something about.  So, 92% of worrying is useless.  Worrying adds nothing to our life (MT 6:27) and doing it shows that we don't trust God (MT 6:28-30).

For the record, I completely agree.  But I still do it.  He's right--most of what I worry about won't happen and the rest is about health.  I used to worry about loosing our house.  Not because we were in any imminent danger of it, but all around us in Arizona, houses were for sale because people lost them, not because they wanted to move.  We lived in one such house.  I was very aware that we might have been living in someone else's dream home--and they lost it.

Working with (or rather, for) so many sick kids, I worry often about every pain or ache in my children.  I've heard too many stories about a simple growing pain that ended up in sarcoma or a headache that was really brain cancer.  Nothing anyone did caused those tragedies but they happened--unexpectedly.

When I was job hunting I worried what might happen if it took too long to find one and we found ourselves out of money.  Don't get me started on airplane and car wrecks.  So far, none of it has happened.  But I still worry.

Max says it shows we don't trust God (actually Matthew says that) but I'm not sure I completely agree.  I don't worry that God is incapable of preventing these things or even getting me through them if they happen.  I worry about what He'll ask me to go through.  I can survive anything if He decides it should be so.  But I don't want to survive these things.  I want to avoid them.

I suppose he is right in that worrying won't help.  If God will ask me to bury a child or a husband or live homeless and penniless, I will.  Not because I want to but because He ultimately decides and I have no way around it.  I don't worry that He can't see me through or even that He can't make sure it doesn't happen.  I worry that He won't.  And for whatever reason--some lesson I must learn, some sign he must show someone, something my children must see.  I don't know.  I won't ever claim to know His motives beyond love and salvation (which I don't always understand).  But I do know what I have survived.

I've survived the devastating pain of loving someone who doesn't love you back.  I've survived a physical attack.  I've survived childbirth (3 times!), car accidents, job loss, illness, miscarriage, and (so far) parenting three girls mostly by myself (with lots of long-distance help from my husband), and  a whole lot of other stuff that's way too personal to put out in the cosmos.  These are things other people worry about that never happen to them.  These are my 8% and mostly, I don't worry about it.  Because He did get me through...and I barely even noticed the pain in the moment or the lesson after was so clear I was thankful to have experienced the pain if it meant learning the lesson.

But I still worry.  What will He ask of me next? 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Shoes=Outside

The Wonderful World of Meat Substitutes

Stupid stupid STUPID!