Tossing Worry

The rea­son Jesus taught his fol­low­ers not to worry is that worry implies an uncar­ing or totally absent God. The fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between the world and believ­ers is that the world thinks there is noth­ing more to the story than what they expe­ri­ence here. Deep down inside, they are a very sad lot. All they have is what they have for a few decades. No won­der they are so fran­tic. For them, life is a can­dle inevitably burn­ing toward its last flicker of warmth and light. They are in a race against the clock — a race they know they will inevitably lose.
Belief is more than a wish. It is the con­fi­dence that the spark never goes out — that some­how there is for­ever an “I” that has some sort of eter­nal con­ti­nu­ity. Peo­ple work from one of two pos­si­bil­i­ties: acci­dent or pur­pose. For the world, life is an acci­dent — an anom­aly that fell together from car­bon, water, oxy­gen, etc. For believ­ers, it is a cre­ated gift from the lov­ing God. The dif­fer­ence between the two is most notice­able at funer­als.
I am the sort of per­son that makes con­tin­ual res­o­lu­tions. Some of them come at New Year’s, but the vast major­ity of them are day-to-day shifts in atti­tude. Repen­tance is a way of life, not merely some occa­sional reli­gious rit­ual. For believ­ers, things do not have to go well to be well. We live in for­give­ness. Our mis­takes are for our matur­ing. Things we can­not con­trol we accept or tran­scend. Per­spec­tive is more impor­tant than con­for­mity. Worry indi­cates a loss of per­spec­tive. Worry is a warn­ing light on the dash­board of the soul that we have neglected dis­cern­ment and got­ten off course.
As I look back at life, I wish I had not wor­ried so much. Being human is not inher­ently easy, and it is much more dif­fi­cult with anx­i­ety tossed into the mix. It would be great to live again with­out the neg­a­tive emo­tions — espe­cially the fears…and I live believ­ing that is exactly what is going to hap­pen. Thus it gets eas­ier to live care free.