|
|
Don’t worry
When our trust in God surpasses any worry we have, then we are truly living bold.
Author: Benjamin Becker
My father seems to have songs for every occasion. They’re not your everyday pop/rock; instead, they are slightly off-key renditions of folk songs, your basic Peter, Paul, and Mary-type music. We always dread saying some word that will set him off.
Yet some of those songs have real meaning. One song sticks in my mind. The words sometimes go round and round in my head: “Worry is a rocking chair. You go back and forth, but you go nowhere.”
Worry is arguably one of the biggest wastes of the human mind. We go back and forth over everything that has gone wrong, could go wrong, might go wrong, and what, we believe, will go wrong. What if I miss lunch? What if I fail this test? What if they don’t like me? What if I never understand it? What if I get cancer? What if I die? The list goes on and on, ranging from the humorously trivial to the utterly dramatic. It grows the more we think. All these fears and worries hang over us, dragging us down until we break down.
How sad it is that we so easily forget the words of 1 Peter 5:7: “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” We all have heard it. We all know it, and still we refuse to cast our cares upon Christ. Sometimes we even forget the second part of the verse: “because he cares for you.” God does not listen to our problems because he wants the credit for solving them. He does not want payment or favors from us. He does it simply because he cares for us.
The flipside of worry is trust. Trust in God is one of the greatest qualities a person can have. Without trust in God, Noah would not have built the ark, Abraham would not have left his family to go to the land God would show him, Joseph would not have saved his brothers from the famine, Moses would not have taken the Israelites out of Egypt, and David would not have defeated Goliath. Without trust these people would never have understood God’s promises of a Savior. They would have missed the greatest way that God cares for us. The list of people who trusted goes on and on forever—not only in the Bible but also still today. Only those who trust in God can truly achieve great things.
When our trust in God surpasses any worry we have, then we are truly living bold. Our lifestyle in turn affects those around us. We encourage those who have faith, and we get those who do not have faith thinking about what makes us different. When we let our fear and worry overcome our trust in the one who cares for us, we are not the only people we let down.
Worry is indeed a rocking chair, one that we must be careful not to sit in. We must remember that when we rock harder and harder in that chair eventually we will come crashing down. How hard is it just to cast all your cares on Christ, taking them to him in prayer? How hard is it to overcome our worry and live lives of faith? All we need is to trust in God with faith the size of a mustard seed.
Benjamin Becker, a junior at Kettle Moraine Lutheran High School, Jackson, Wisconsin, is a member at St. John, Lannon, Wisconsin.
Volume 96, number 8, 08-1-2009, category: youth
Copyrighted by WELS Forward in Christ © 2009
Permission is granted for a single personal copy of an article. Contact Kristine Laufer at 414-615-5706 or lauferk@nph.wels.net regarding any other use.
|
