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Be Happy! Day 3

Master your worries

What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labour under the sun? All their days their work is pain and grief; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless. People can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their work. Ecclesiastes 2.22–24

Why Jesus? Because he was utterly practical about how to live a worthwhile life. He calmed anxiety. His advice worked.

He spoke to the widow – lonely and debilitated out of fear for the future. He spoke to the man sinking under debt – worrying where the strength would come from to get a foothold. He spoke to those who were so anxious about material things that there was no room to grow in peace, joy and love – those who had reached that terrible state because they were so poor, and those who were in the same trap because they were so rich.

So when Jesus says, ‘Don’t worry!’ you know he isn’t just patting people on the head and saying, ‘There, there!’ Rather, he is intent on improving people’s lives. And I’m the kind of person who needs to be persuaded that there is a reason not to be anxious. I’m a born worrier.

After I left school, aged eighteen, I worked in a warehouse while I was waiting for my exam results to come out. I worried endlessly about whether I’d studied hard enough to get into college. I remember the forklift truck driver saying to me: ‘What’s the point of getting anxious about college? You can’t quote Shakespeare when you’re dead. My religion is: There’s no worry on earth that can’t be put right by a cold lager and a hot woman.’

Well, I’ve had several cold lagers since then!

I think about what he said from time to time, because more or less his exact words appear in the Bible. The man who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes was every bit as cynical as the driver. Jesus must have known these words: ‘What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labour under the sun? People can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their work.’

It seems impossible that these sarcastic words are in the Bible! But of course, just because they are in the Bible, it doesn’t mean the Bible approves of them. Ecclesiastes is one of the parts of the Bible that tells you, ‘This is how people in your world will think, but it’s not how the people of God are to think.’ Rise above this! Rise above it. Find a better way.

And of course, Jesus did find a better way. This was his contrasting advice: ‘Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.’ It is as if Jesus deliberately set out to give the writer of Ecclesiastes a slap in the face: ‘How dare you be so cynical!’ And I’ll bet he would say the same to the warehouse guy as well.

[Jesus said,] ‘Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest? Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour 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, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. Luke 12.25–31

Pardon me and pray for me. Pray for me, I say. For I am sometimes so fearful, that I would creep into a mouse-hole. Sometimes God doth visit me again with his comfort. So he cometh and goeth. Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, in a letter from prison to his friend Bishop Nicholas Ridley, shortly before he was put to death for his faith, 1485–1555

Anxiety is going to be a fact of life, but there are two ways of responding to it. One of them is: ‘Blot it out with whatever you can find – in a bottle, in a fridge, in a shopping mall, or by working so hard that you never have to deal with it.’ That’s the cynic’s way.

Alternatively, there is the way of Jesus, who says, ‘My method won’t blot out worry. Or magic it away. But I can give you a secure way of dealing with it. Do you want to know more?’

I worry until midnight, and from then on I let God worry. Luigi Guanella, founder of an Italian monastic order, 1842–1915

Of course we want to know more! Jesus gives us three straightforward reasons why we shouldn’t worry. The first one that it’s pointless. Jesus, though, said it rather more poetically: ‘Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?’

The average English woman lives 709,560 hours. If you spend all the waking ones worrying that this is not enough, will you live one more? Not a chance! So do something more practical than worrying. If you are lying in bed unable to sleep, form a plan for the next day. When you’ve made up your mind what you are going to do, tell yourself that you have done everything you can and that you will just have to hand over to God the things that are out of your control. There is no guarantee that this will get you to sleep, but it makes far better use of the boring, wakeful hours than letting anxiety spin out of control.

The second reason is that worrying shows a lack of faith in God’s ability to provide. Once again, Jesus’ version is wonderfully memorable: ‘If God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you.’

God of every living thing, I don’t ask you to blot out everything that makes me anxious. But I do ask for reassurance that you are very close to me in this worrisome world. Amen.

Tell yourself, when you are full of anxiety, that this is what you are a Christian for. Moments like these! This is the time when people who have no faith have nothing to turn to. But in contrast, it is the time when all those minutes you have spent in prayer with God, added up over 709,560 hours, will strengthen you in a unique way. So assert at moments of high anxiety: ‘I may be worried, but in God I have something precious – and now is the time to call on it to sustain me.’

And the third reason: if you are a Christian, there is no need to be preoccupied with the same things that the rest of the world frets over: ‘Do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things.’

I remember the first time that the very different way Christians can think came home to me. While I worked in that warehouse all my friends were passing their driving tests and practising their negotiating skills by getting their parents to lend them a car on a Saturday night. I recall one of my friends coming out of my home and finding that, while his mother’s car was parked, someone had dented the wing. So there was great deal of worrying that evening, and I went with him in case breaking the news turned out to be traumatic. But his mother’s first words were: ‘It’s a thing, not a person. First of all tell me whether you are OK.’ And I can remember thinking, ‘Good grief! That’s how Christians prioritize matters. That’s not what I expected at all.’

It still stays with me, that happy memory. It’s one of the many, many reasons I now follow Jesus. The logic of his reassurance still speaks to me across 2,000 years (that’s 17,520,000 hours). God’s care for all I can see – flowers, birds, fields – gives me confidence for all I can’t see. He is at work in that as well. So master your worries!

Be happy! Think back ten years. What age were you? What were the things that were worrying you most then? And what were you most worried about five years ago? And twelve months ago? What are your feelings today about the anxieties you had then? Now make a list of the things that worry you most now. Be frank with God about how you feel about them, and then wait to see whether God will be equally frank with you.