"Worry is imagination misplaced." - unknown
As a child I worried that my body would fail me. My heart held the vivid and frightening story that if, for some reason, my asthma medication was no longer available, or if, by happenstance, I became homeless and the only place to lay my head was on a hay bale in a barn...that would be the end of Sarah Jo Glewwe. Frequent trips real-life to the emergency room informed that imaginative story, but imagination is almost always worse than reality. I'm still here.
As a teen, I worried about the things we all worried about. Was my face clear enough? Were my clothes cool? Was I smart? Talented? Good? Who were my real friends? And of course, there was the boy-attention question. In those days, my dad would console me, "Don't worry, Honey. Most people are too busy thinking about themselves to be thinking much about you." This is quite true. But my imagination was really adept at putting thoughts into other people's minds. Creative scenarios played out in my self-centered mind-cinema most days. Misplaced imagination, this.
As a young adult I worried that I would be left behind in the experience-the-world, fall-in-love, have-babies kind of way. So many things must fall into place, just so, in order for LIFE to START, no less flourish. I wasn't the sort who had her wedding planned and her kids names chosen, but I did have a strong desire to live life to the fullest. The path ahead of me seemed so wide-open. And it was! The pages of my book had not yet been written so my imagination filled them with messy, scary "what-ifs".
Worry tempts me every day.
Now, as a 49-year-old woman with 3 mostly-grown sons and an entrepreneurial-leaning husband, my future is still full of unknowns. Oh so unpredictable. And worry almost always seems the right response. It masquerades as wisdom.
On a world-wide scale things are chaotic and unknown, too, with political unrest, threatening rulers, separation and division, and dug-in binary arguments about which facts are even true.
Oh so unpredictable.
Worry almost always seems the right response. It masquerades as wisdom.
BUT...Worry is our imagination at work creating a false future - a future that isn't REAL - yet. Worry is rehearsing the lie that our future is going to be struggle, defeat, and loneliness. It's believing the lie that the God of the Universe is not WITH us, FOR us. It's imagining we are without hope and ever-present divine goodness toward us. And it's believing we do not have in-born creative juices that will enable us to dance through our life-paths, even as challenges present themselves. Worry is imagining a future without God.
I have made some messes. I have made missteps. But, I have seen more beauty and joy in this life than I ever knew was possible. We are NOT alone.
2000 years ago Jesus talked about worry. He said, "...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? 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? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow? They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 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?" Matt 6:25-30
Why worry?
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