I’m a worrier!!!  You can ask my wife.  It can keep me up at night.  All night!  Yes, I have learned and I know that worrying cannot add a moment of life to anyone.  But yet I still worry.  I’ve been a worrier since I could remember, I was trained from an early age to always run to the worst-case scenario in any situation.  It became a default position of pessimism. (You know the definition of a pessimist — an optimist with experience.).

Too be honest, I simply have a desire for things to work out well and run smoothly.  I truly want everyone to be happy and to get along.  Well, you and I both know that things rarely run smoothly and well.  The fact of the matter is that I am no different than anyone else.  I usually worry about the normal things.  Money, health, children, family, and people in general.

Notice that I did not say that I stress over these things, there is a difference.  There does come a point when I let it go and move on.  Well, this summer I’m challenging myself to not worry so much.  I am making a focused effort to try and relax.  Or, as we say, let go and let God!

To help me I’ve pick up a book that I’ll be reading throughout the summer, titled, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.  So far, Dale Carnegie’s book, has, offered what I think is some good advice.

Basically, he advocates doing three things if you have a worry problem:

+ Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen?”
+ Prepare to accept it, if you have to.
+ Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.

That’s the kind of advice a default pessimist can grab, given that there’s always something to worry about.

But while Carnegie’s advice is good, it doesn’t get at the root problem — our anxiety. Jesus told us not to worry and yet it seems that many Christians are conditioned to do nothing else. We are an anxious people, easily stoked by fear in a culture that uses anxiety as a selling point for everything from politics to the food you buy in the grocery store.

It’s no wonder, then, that you don’t see much joy in Christianity.  There’s a lot more moralizing, complaining, criticizing and finger wagging.  Instead of people of joy, we tend to be known as a cranky and anti-social.  Clergy are burning out at an increasingly higher rate.  Denominational meetings are conventions of pessimists. Churches are filled with religious consumers who jump from church to church based on what’s in it for them.  Gossip and backbiting fill parking lots and blog posts. We scramble to find ways to soothe our personal needs and desires. Joy is in short supply.

What I hope to recapture is that If we believe in Jesus, then we have to remember that whatever worst-case scenario we can conjure up, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus from the dead means that it’s already been handled.  So, this summer I’m focusing on worrying less and being a better follower of Christ!  Join me?

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