I am a recovering Type A personality control person, who is learning after three-score-and-ten+ years to Let Go and Let God! When I turned 60, I began to try to live by this principle: if it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter in five minutes.
Well said. Hard to apply.
Now, I know a lot of people live under stressful circumstances: financial, physical, emotional, relational, and any other -al your mind (not mine at six o’clock in the morning) can create.
Life is not supposed to be all roses and sunshine. If it were so, man’s creative imagination would have nothing to challenge it, and life would be BORING. Were we not planning, problem solving, imagining, improving, creating, and learning, our lives would be more like stones and other inanimate objects than what we were created to be.
Indeed, if we faced no problems, which I prefer to call challenges, I think we would use less of our brain power than the ten percent experts say we use on a daily basis.
I prefer to think that if we did not have creative challenges to think about, we would create them out of nothing. Therefore, we would WORRY over having nothing to WORRY about!
The solution I have found is my profound belief, proven over and over again by experience, that my commitment to God’s sovereignty and His plan for my life means I do not have to WORRY about anything, although my selfish carnal nature reserves that right when I forget to focus on God’s will and not my own.
These verses from Proverbs 12:25 and 14:30 keep me grounded, and may help you focus on the majors and not the minors today: “Worry weighs a person down; and an encouraging word cheers a person up. A relaxed attitude lengthens life; jealousy rots it away.” As my daily “read through the Bible in a year” guide says for today: “You may not be able to change your circumstances–but you can change your attitude.
So: here’s my list for today of things I could be WORRIED about, but am not: my kidney stone just waiting to make my day miserable; my book in progress which is stalled at chapter 9; my son who has a high-stakes audition in Washington, DC this morning; our son and daughter-in-love who are moving in 3 weeks and have no idea where; my children’s (orchestra teachers) eight concerts in the next week, many of which conflict with each other; finances (always); a prayer list which lengthens each day with seemingly impossible requests for God’s intervention, except that He is able to answer each one magnificently in ways we can’t even imagine; time to get all the things done today that need my attention; chores and gardening which beckon, but not loudly enough to prevent my going to the zoo today with the Best Yet Set group from church.
So, the worries are on the back burner, with God in charge of doing what He does all the time, providing for both our immediate and long-range needs. And when it’s four-score-years, I’ll continue to look back at His guiding hand through each one, and say to you and thankfully to Him, “He has done all things well.”
May this be your thought for the day too!
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