Spiritual Sundays: Furrowed Foreheads

The day of spiritual things. ***** Matthew 6: 25-34 NIV

25 “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?

26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[a]?

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.

29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.

30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’

32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.

33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

How do you not worry? Worry is the badge of motherhood. A badge with a pin that pricks your skin constantly.

My mother was a worrier. She developed deep furrows across her brow. She was always worrying and always on edge, waiting for the next disaster to happen. And it usually did. My mother's life was one disaster after another. She earned those worry furrows. Life was difficult for her until she died. She had a right to worry. There's another definition of worry "to tear at, gnaw on, or drag around with the teeth." My mother did that. She would gnaw on a worry and drag it around, and hide it away and bring it out again.

I was given the gift of not being a worrier. Perhaps I’m just good at avoiding things. If I don’t think about them, they won’t happen. Oh sure, I can get myself riled up about something. I can agonize over things in the past. But for the most part, I use avoidance. It's prevented me from getting my mother's deep furrows. I also have relatively few lines for my age. On the other hand, I have jowls. Like an English bulldog jowls. I think I'd rather have elegant lines than jowls. There's more than my fair share of flappery on my body, I don't need my face cheeks and my chin to flap too. I inherited that from my mother. So my mother was a worrier and I'm an avoider and neither one is particularly healthy.

Worry is a tool. Like a hammer. You can use it to build something or destroy something.

Worry should bring you to action. For instance, let’s say that you worry that the house will burn down. Is sitting there stewing over the house burning down going to prevent the house from burning down? Nope. Especially if while you're stewing you are smoking a cigarette in a room with a hundred lit candles by billowing curtains and a pile of firecrackers.

But being proactive can help prevent it from happening. You can be vigilant over turning off the stove, making sure that there’s nothing flammable near the pilot light on the furnace or hot water heater, have a smoke alarm, perhaps a fire extinguisher always ready and make sure your electrical is up to code and you’re not over using the outlets. You can have insurance, a practiced escape plan with a couple of options, a muster point, an emergency bag for each person, and enough gas in the car for a get away. You can even plan ahead of time of what you will grab if you are evacuated. You can make sure you have backups of your pictures, your computer, and important documents. You can have emergency money in your bank account so you have a place to go.

That’s not worry. That’s being practical. See, you can be a worrier. Or you can be a warrior. Heh, heh, see what I did there?

Worry is if once you’ve done everything you can do to prepare, you still stew over it.

Let it go. Worry has worked for you in a positive way. You don’t need to worry anymore about a fire because there’s nothing more you can do. You’ve done your part. Worrying won’t make it not happen. At some point you have to say to God, "I've done what I can. I'm handing it over to you now." And then you hand it over. As the scriptures says "each day has troubles of its own." We don't need to borrow trouble. We don't need to invest in trouble. Trouble will come to us and it will be more than enough to handle, so there's no point in worrying about what might happen when you have to deal with today. Besides, it's pretty hard to make steps forward if you're worried about what might happen. Would Dorothy have gone down the yellow brick road if she worried that trees were going to throw apples at her, and poppies were going to kill her, and demonic flying monkeys would carry her away to a mad witch's castle? Of course not. She would have said, "Look Glinda, I'm not going down that road. I'll stay right here with the Lollipop Guild and the Lullaby League and be the tallest person." But if she had done that, she wouldn't have met the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, The Lion, and Oz. She wouldn't have had any adventures. She wouldn't have known what she was capable of. She wouldn't have gone home. And most importantly, we wouldn't have had a movie or about a hundred Oz books.

Worry will only give you furrows in your brow, and those aren’t particularly pretty.

Just don’t worry about the furrows in your brow.