Normally, I post about four times a week. I write on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, posting just after midnight so that the posts run Monday through Thursday.
I was shy a post last week because I ran up against my own failure. I stopped to write on Worry about a half dozen times, but every time I crashed into writer’s block—not a typical problem for me.
Over this weekend, I confronted my blockage and realized what had monkey-wrenched my gears. The reason I suddenly found myself at a loss for words is that worry is the single biggest sin in my own life.
I didn’t start out being a worrier. I don’t believe that any Christian who struggles with worry does. You can’t get sidetracked unless you’re already on the journey.
No one thought of me as a worrier, quite the opposite; I was the quintessential optimist. Still, I had my share of setbacks as I entered my twenties.
One of my friends took special note of the particularly harsh events that followed me around for a few years. Going for a drive together one night, he confessed to me that the reason he wasn’t a Christian was me. I was shocked. Hadn’t I been a good witness? Where had I gone wrong? He told me that it had nothing to do with how I lived out the Faith. My friend explained that he could not understand how God could treat one of His followers—me—so badly. If that is how God worked, he didn’t want any part of that God. Of course, I tried to sway him, but he didn’t want to hear it.
I shook off the funk of that night, but something had been planted in me that took root. I started noting how I fell into worst case scenarios quite often. Didn’t know why. That’s not the way that I prayed.
So I started worrying. I started thinking about the worst thing that could happen. I worried when I considered decisions. I learned to ignore shock when the worst possible thing actually came to pass. I didn’t become a pessimist as much as a disillusioned optimist.
But I’m a Christian, right?
We all know Abraham as one of the patriarchs of the Faith. Abraham was a worrier, though. Like most worriers, he envisioned the worst possible outcome. Think about this: Abraham worried that as he traveled, foreign kings would think his wife was such a hottie that he’d be killed and his wife wife-napped. So he hatched a plan to pass her off as his sister. Strangely enough, his worst case scenario came to pass. Twice!
Elijah fled into the desert, fearing that Jezebel would hunt him down and have his head. God fed him by ravens, yet Elijah still wallowed in his worry.
The Bible doesn’t have nearly as many verses on worry and anxiety as some other issues believers face. Jesus’ well-known words on worry, lilies, and sparrows is one of the most direct passages. Most of us know Philippians 4:6-7 by heart.
But as someone who struggles with worry, I’ve wondered why so many other Christians are tripped up by this problem.
Christianity is a faith that has strong roots in the past and a vision always looking to the future. Both the past and future play into worry. We can worry that choices we made in the past will somehow culminate in heartbreak later in the future. Worry, by its nature, fears what might be coming around the bend. Worriers prepare with hopes to prevent the future they don’t wish to see. Worriers, therefore, are people who can never live in the present.
Because there is such a strong emphasis in Christianity on eternal reward, Christians who struggle with worry are always fighting to ensure they are laying up treasure in heaven, fretting when that goal isn’t being met. And for Christians who worry, self-examination is never the issue. They are always keenly aware of each and every sin, every lack, every area that needs growth. Sometimes it seems overwhelming
Was what I did enough? Why did that happen? I did as God said to, but I failed. Why? The Bible says this, but the experience was just the opposite. I must have done something wrong since the Scriptures are always right.
Do any of those sound familiar?
At the heart of worry is fear. At the heart of that fear is loss.
You’d expect churches to deal with loss better than any other group, but in America that is often not the case. I think the Church does well with death in most cases, but other kinds of loss are bobbled. I know from personal experience that job loss is not handled well. Downward mobility is also problematic for some churches. I’ve known widows and widowers who received plenty of comfort within weeks of losing a spouse, but a year later their support had vanished. And for every heartwarming story of church support for those who have lost their health, there are others that border on horrifying.
So some Christians who face those issues worry.
For me, all I want is to be in God’s will because I know that being in His will means that I am living life to the fullest this side of heaven. I want with all my heart to go the Scriptures and find the answers for each situation I find myself in day by day.
What makes this harder is when the message of American Christianity intersects with that desire and crushes it.
As most of you know, I’m a stay-at-home dad. I do have a writing business, but my wife works outside of the home. Life is tough in Ohio right now. Our unemployment rate (from what I read a couple days ago in the local paper) is running 7% above the rest of the country. That means that a little more than one out of ten people in this state are unemployed. Many people we know are struggling and all the couples we know who were vehement about not falling into a dual-breadwinner household are finding that reality and theory aren’t intersecting any longer.
From where I sit, parts of the Godblogosphere and many portions of American Christianity have tried, convicted and sentenced to hell folks like us. There are a lot of Christian voices out there, many of them quite wise, but when they come down on your own little noggin, it’s hard to avoid worry for those of us who want to be doing the right thing. I don’t know how many times I’ve just wanted to burn my computer and forget blogging or reading blogs because yet another person I respected told me I was as bad as an unbeliever because I wasn’t the primary breadwinner.
Pick any aspect of Christianity and there’s a person laboring under a millstone of worry because they aren’t stacking up to the “accepted standard.”
I started out this post by saying that worrying is a sin. It’s rooted in fear and lack of trust; there’s no excuse for it.
But to all those Christians who don’t struggle with worry, I ask that instead of making it harder for worriers to triumph over worry, come alongside them. I know that I try very hard not to create burdens for people who come to Cerulean Sanctum. Millstones are plentiful in the American Church, unfortunately, and when we’re not placing them on each other, we’re often failing to help others remove the stone necklaces the world adds.
Some days are better than others for me. I pray that every day I shake off more worry. I know I’m not alone. As much as we talk about trusting God, there are more people like me in American churches than I could count in my lifetime.
We say that faith is like jumping off a cliff, but we don’t have a good answer for folks who wind up like Wile E. Coyote, nothing more than a poof of sand and a crater at the bottom of the canyon. If we did a better job backing up people, perhaps we’d have a lot fewer worriers in the Church.
I’ll start by giving credit where credit is due. The pastor of my church preached on the Numbers and Judges passages below, so credit goes to Mark Otten for inspiring part of this post. Yet because this fits so well with the posts to come—and is an issue discussed recently on other blogs—I felt it was a great place to start this mini-series, “When Believers Stumble.”