15/52 consider the lillies

Worry has become an increasingly unfamiliar emotion over the years. I'm so thoroughly surrounded by chronic worriers that it completely baffles me. It never helps. One friend commented that it must take a lot of faith to be so free from worry. I don't think so. I just think worrying is irrational most of the time. It's bizarre how few Christians realize the paradox of worry and the things they claim to believe. For example, my dad believes God cured his cancer. But his worry intimates the belief that somehow the God who can cure cancer can't keep me healthy when I travel. (Granted, worrying incessantly about your kid is like a defining characteristic of parents.) It just doesn't make sense.

But this week that once familiar specter of worry began to rear its terrible, useless head. I wondered if I was making a mistake, if I was making my future more uncertain than it has to be. That excerpt from Matthew 6 came to mind. We hear it so often in church and fellowship that I think we become dull to the words.

Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried canadd a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! ... So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

But when we meditate on these words and reflect on the one who spoke them, all worry seems irrelevant.