Perhaps all of us have heard someone say to us: Don’t worry. We may not be worrying, but the glib friend thinks we may be worrying, or will worry. It may be said in jest: Not to worry. The situation in such an instance is usually simple so may set up an entertaining exchange. It is said that Martin Luther was something of a worrier. He was confronted one morning with his wife dressed in mourning garb. He wanted to know who had died. His wife answered matter-of-factly: God! When he remonstrated with her about the joke, she replied: You have been going around with such a worried manner that I was sure that God had died. There are persons so formed that they easily fall to a worry pattern, even when they are unsure what it is that they are supposed to be worried about. At the other end are persons who never worry, some of whom don’t worry because they don’t understand the situation. One worrier argued that worry does work, proven by the fact that nearly everything she worried about didn’t happen. With so much success she would not want to give up development of her worrying skills. Concern over a matter requiring time, thought, planning, perhaps needing tangible resources for serious problem solving is not worry. It replaces worry, is often exciting, expresses leadership, uses maturity, requires work, builds relationships if others are included, and offers personal fulfillment. There are good substitutes for worry.
In his business life and counsel, Harvey Mackay captures his value oriented column, well received in a leading Minnesota newspaper, the factors related to both the good life and effective business (work) practices. In one column he addressed the matter of worry: Worrying about things eats up all your energy. It likely does not eat up all, but he is right-on when he addresses the matter of worry and energy. He noted the worrier cited above who credited worry as the solution for the problems she worried about. He noted a survey in which it was concluded that only 8% of our worry concerns are worth worrying about, but he rejected even the 8%. Years earlier he had written a column offering a Second Ten Commandments in which the first was: Thou shalt not worry, for worry is the most unproductive of all human activities. He then dropped in the statement, not to be forgotten: You can’t saw sawdust. By that he meant that the past was sawdust, and the future as well. The past is over, and the future is yet to be. All we have is this day in hand to manage as well as we can. He quotes from Robert Leahy’s, The Worry Cure which addresses the point that worriers are intolerant of uncertainty causing them to lose control and only build their anxiety. . . . . worriers almost always overestimate the negative outcome. And they have forgotten: …. that their past worries have mostly turned out to be futile. (All business people should read Mackay’s columns.)
In his business, Mackay calls his team (we may use family) together and they seek to answer the dual question: What are we trying to accomplish and what is the worst thing that can happen? So they determine the best action to fallback negative outcome does occur. He offered data as to how this positive approach may have appeared to impact persons favorably for long life – even exceeding 100 years of age. The point in all this is that accented in a number of Pages in this series of years – affirmation of the possible so to work to make the better action probable. There are too many factors to make any guarantees for this or that element in the compound of life, belief and action. That God is the affirmative of our lives is major for persons of Christian faith. Whatever is good for others is good for us, and that is always in the affirmation of ethical, even moral positives. The negatives are always related to some violation of a better way. There is an old joke among Christians: Why pray when you can worry? We would accent the positive: Why worry when you can pray? To pray is to invite the person of God to assist us in our concern. Worry has been moved up to concern, which is more realistic to matters implying either problem-solving or acceptance for outcome. I pray for the matter of concern. The concern generally fits into a natural order for solution, which order is as certainly from God as a miracle. We are not likely to know if there is some miracle found in the solution. The most likely miracle is in the relief that a believing person gains from effective prayer – to roll-over the burden and a free spirit to emerge – without worry. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020