The next day I called Stevie and explained to him why I had not been myself over dinner. It is not often that I can visit my hometown and go out to dinner with my two best friends, Stevie and his wife, Jenny, so I felt terrible I had squandered what could have been a great evening out. I was honest with him; he's a good friend, in that, he knows when I'm being honest with him, confessing it all. "I was kind of depressed," I told Stevie. "You ever feel that way, man? Just sort of under the weather, mentally and emotionally?" He replied that he had indeed felt that way many times. "I think I'm just worried ... about resigning from the youth minister position, about transitioning to a third year of school ... about that girl ... about ... about ... about ..."
We are captives to worry most of out lives. Often, I believe, if we consider ourselves happy people, the worries that consume us are minor. They are normally manageable - we usually just accept them as an inevitability in life. They rub themselves into the grain of our lives - a few leave those little dark stains that don't bother us all that much as long as they stay small - and we do not think much of it. However, there are those seasons in life where all we know is worry. Tumbling, pompous boulders of worry fill up our minds and we're lucky if we can manifest a coherent thought in the midst of the avalanche. School work goes to pot, or at least becomes three-times the chore it ever was before. In every moment of silence the brain spins so loudly in its desperate effort to dig through the debris that there can rarely be found any peace.
We can call them "concerns." We can call them "issues." We can call them "points of focus." The criteria to understand all these as "worry" is quite simple - are they robbing me of peace? Are they drawing me away from a steadfast living of my life? Giving them a less intimidating, more manageable name does not really help, does it?
Rich Mullins wrote, "We are haunted by the ghosts of the "what ifs" who live in the shadows of the "if onlys." That certainly feels true - to be worried is to be haunted. And to be haunted is to be chained, to be boxed in, to be locked away, to be afraid. To be haunted is to be stripped of freedom.
Jesus declared, "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36) Granted, he supposedly said this while discussing sinful nature with the Jews, not while discussing "worry." But the truth remains - we are called to live as people who have been set free. This includes (I submit that it is integrally related to) how we handle the presence of "worry" in our lives. We allow ourselves to be held captives within prison cells that have doors swung wide open. Night after night, we slowly rot in these cells, and rarely will anyone call out to us and remind us that we have not been locked in - most people are just like us, wallowing in their own open-door cages.
I do not advocate playing pretend. The reality of worry is too great and too serious to just live our lives acting as if nothing bothers us. Some people do this, and they appear to us as inhuman, like robots who cannot express emotion. And worry is not easy to get rid of; there is no easy-step formula despite what the good-intentioned Joel Osteens and Rick Warrens might say. Struggle is a reality within life, especially the Christian life. Take a look at any person in Scripture (or Church history) whose life was genuinely changed by God's revelation to them: hardships came to every one of them, many times with greater gusto than before they had experienced their Redeemer's touch.
So how do we marry the inevitability of worry/struggle with this call of the Savior to live as one who is free? To this I have only flowery, fluffy answers that will not sustain. But I'm reading a book right now that reminds me that the purpose of life is experienced not at the final destination, but slowly all along the journey. I think the answer to this question lies somewhere down this road I walk. This road you walk. This road we all walk.
There is one thing I do know - God, in calling us to so much, has not asked us to do "it" all, but simply to make an effort. We do not have to pretend we know what we're doing, or that, really, nothing is bothering us, or that we are only living right when we have everything situated in our lives just like we want it. In other words, when he says to cast our cares on him (Ps. 55:22), we are expected to cast. When he says not to let our hearts be troubled (John 14:1), we are to rest in our belief in him. When he says to keep in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:25), we are to summon our weary feet to continue the journey. When he says to not be afraid (Jer. 1:8), we may recognize we are haunted by a hundred million things, but we should find no reason to shudder.
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