"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?” ‒ Matthew 6:25 (NIV)
For much of my life, I was a champion worrier. I worried about things I had absolutely NO control over—the weather, a conversation I wasn’t even part of, what a stranger would think about my outfit, traffic, you name it. In the late ‘90s, I was responsible for my organization’s in-house technology infrastructure and managed a group of techies. Late one Friday night (because technology always “happens” when you’re ready to go do something else), the team found a big problem with our firewall. We needed the equipment to last until the next morning when we could replace it. Of course, my worry meter went off the charts. The curmudgeonly coder who had already seen more tech disasters than I ever will said, “Cheryl, this incident is binary. The equipment will last tonight or it won’t. You worrying about it won’t influence the outcome.”
My head heard him that night (but I still put in time worrying!). My heart didn’t hear this message until 2006 when my late husband Don and I were simultaneously diagnosed with cancer—mine was “garden-variety” breast cancer; his was much more “interesting” to all the medical professionals because it was a rare form of mesothelioma caused by radiation treatments he had to cure Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the ‘80s.
As we went through a variety of treatments, so many prayers and acts of kindness from people, near and far (including SCC), brought a peace that sustained during the hardest of times and could only have come from God. Worry didn’t influence the outcome in this situation, and I would have robbed myself of the joy from seeing God work “all things together for good…”
I challenge you to pray that you’ll stop worrying about something, big or small, and see if your joy increases, too.
- Cheryl Collins