Are you worried today? Anxious about your kids? Your job? Your volunteer position? We women have been trained to worry. We were taught how by our mothers and they were taught by our grandmother’s and on and on.
I remember the day that my mother taught me to worry. My dad was late coming home. One of his oil wells he was working on had sprung a leak and the Bureau of Land management had insisted he shut the well down. To keep production up he had to make the repair that day. This was a rare occurrence since my dad ran a tight ship (oil field). He was always on time. It is understandable that she was worried. She started thinking of everything that could be wrong.
Why do we do this to ourselves. Things go wrong all the time and we have to deal with it. Why make up stuff that had not even happened?
In my moms case she worried about all the wrong things. She worried about my dad’s safety but she didn’t take care of her body and had a stroke at 54. I believe that worry contributed to that stroke.
We come from a culture of worry. The news gets us to watch so we can feed our anxiety, fear and worry. So why stop it and find a way to live without worry?
- Our happiness. Worry makes us miserable and irritable.
- Our health. It is bad for your heart and blood pressure.
- Our Salvation. James wrote faith without works is dead. If we go through Life worrying we are not exhibiting faith. The Apostle Paul must have had a challenge with this along with pesky regret writing:
2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us that we are to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
A few years ago I learned the secret to stopping worry in its tracks. This right here has been my key. The recipe for eliminating worry.
It works like this. The worry thought of my loved one dying in a fiery crash comes into your mind. I check to see if there is an immediate action needed such as an actual emergency. Once the thought is determined to be a pretend emergency capture the thought. Sometimes I have to use my real hands to scoop it the imaginary event. Then I present it to God to make it obedient to him. Treat it like an offering. We are giving up our sense of control that we have when we worry and give it to God. This is a faith action.
Yes, when we worry we believe that we can stop it from happening if we take the pain of the even onto ourselves in advance. This is a lie and superstition. We can not control anything through worry except our blood pressure and it goes in the wrong direction.
Give worries over to God. Free your mind from the paralizing effect of fear. God is faithful.
John 14:27
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”
