Day 18: The choice of worry
Read it: Matthew 6:25-27 & James 4:14-17
Live it:
Do you have a fitness tracker that tracks your steps? What about a sleep tracker that tracks your sleep? What about a food tracker that tracks the food you eat? Maybe you have a device that helps you track it all.
A tracker like this can help improve your health, but there’s something that also affects our health that trackers don’t track: worry. Take a second and imagine if we had a worry tracker. It could beep at us and say, “Congratulations! You have worried for a solid two hours today.” I’ve heard studies say that anywhere from 85%-95% of worries never come true. Worrying is defined as focusing on my fears instead of God. Worry doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t help.
We can’t change the past by worrying. Believe me, if I could go back and change the past, I would do many things differently. But I choose to live one day at a time, not in the past and not in the future.
Last month, I took time to review my past year, and I identified the one thing that I did that affected my life the most. It was this: when I faced a situation where I had no control over the outcome (sickness, someone else’s failure that affected me, my own failures, etc), I took my hands and held them out and I gave the situation or issue over to God. That one thing has made the biggest positive difference in my life, and it’s something anyone can do. So if you have something that’s troubling you today, give it over to God’s care and control.
Ps. James