America's pastime of worry

So a guy walks into a bar, and he’s looking pretty frisky. A man on the barstool next to him pipes up: “What are you looking so happy about?” The guy replies, knocking back a shot of whiskey, “I’m lighter than air. I’m paying someone to do my worrying for me.” His puzzled seatmate queries, “How are you going to come up with the money to pay him?” The happy camper answers, “I don’t know. But that’s his worry now.”

This, of course, is a deep spiritual lesson for us all. People who worry are miserable, and people who don’t worry travel light.

But the story is insightful in another way as well. It playfully illustrates the truth that people not only worry but feel the need to worry. This is true to the extent that if the average person were not able, for some reason, to do the daily worrying he is accustomed to doing, he would have to find someone to hire who would do the worrying for him. The point is (we think) that worrying has to get done! Presumably, the sky would fall if we were to drop the ball on worrying, for even a day.

At least this is how things would seem to appear if we considered how positively committed most of us are to worry. Why, at the first rush of consciousness upon waking from our sleep in the morning, do we not take quick mental inventory of the things we are committed to worry about—so as to better attend to the business of worry without further ado?

The next logical question must be the following: Why are we committed to worry? When we know by both experience and by the Word of God that worry and anxiety are neither helpful nor right, why do we persist in them? For the Lord Himself said rhetorically:

“And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Matthew 6:27)

The words rendered “anxious” and “worry” in your New Testament are the same Greek word (merimnao) and mean literally “to be divided, distracted.” This helpful visual of a mind divided is accurate. Worrying is a constant shifting of two different and vying opinions. In the case of the Christian, it is one moment believing that God will take care of me, and the next moment not trusting God to do that and preferring to grasp control of my life for myself.

We arrive at the astounding realization that worry is not something that innocently happens to a person but is a chosen alternative to trusting God.

And it is axiomatic that if we can choose to worry, we can also choose to not worry. Not only can we choose not to worry but we are also commanded by Jesus to do so! How do we do it? Worry, like every other sin of the flesh, involves spiritual battles in high places. (“We do not wrestle against flesh and blood,” as the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians.) If we can “resist the devil” (James 4:7) when it comes to falling into bed with our neighbors’ spouses or stealing their cars, we can resist him when it comes to engaging in America’s pastime of worry.

As in all cases of spiritual resistance, the undesirable thing must be replaced with a good thing. Where we have been assiduous in rehearsing our worries, we must now study to become assiduous in rehearsing the love of God for us. We must stop suppressing the joy that is the natural fruit of the Spirit that wants to come, and we must let this joy and peace flow out of us as it was meant to do.