Worry Is Where Your Treasure Is

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.  --Matthew 6:21

My father was a great worrier.  When asked about why he worried and fretted about so much his pat answer was, "Worry is a form of prayer."  Well, thanks be to his dear resting soul I learned from him how to worry, and for most of my life I have carried the same self-serving excuse.  At 58 years old, however, I have arrived at a place where I am sick of worrying about everything and sick of how it makes me feel insecure at all hours of the night especially.  We live inside our mindsets, another word being our paradigms.  If you live thinking worry is well and good and even noble, you will struggle to accept worry as anything but well, good and noble.  "It's just what I do."  When you start to open the door a crack and allow yourself permission to question the legitimacy of some of your paradigms, God can put a foot in that door and reshape your thinking.  Such is what has happened with me and worry.

No more do I believe worry is a form of prayer.  Here is what worry is: it is a sign of where your treasure is.  When I am worried, my heart is with whomever, or whatever I treasure.  Worry takes me to them/it and causes me to lose hours of sleep dwelling on, basically, what I will lose if something happens to them/it.  That treasure is not where my heart should primarily be!  In fact, if my heart is where my REAL treasure is, then I won't likely be worrying about all those things of this life.  Treasure based in this world's currency: romance, money, property, physical health, food, bills, beauty, etc. "where moth and rust destroy" cannot ever give you the peace and tranquility that trusting God will bring.  For worry-warts I realize I am really pushing their envelopes because we're attached to our worries.  In some perverted unhealthy twist of logic we think we're protecting our loved ones or being responsible for all the possible calamity in the world.  But all the calamity, danger, and loss we imagine in that early pre-dawn light rarely (if ever) happens and worse, it is the antithesis -- that is the OPPPOSITE, of loving God.  Worry is a slap across God's face for all the support, love, benevolence, hope, charity, and providence you've been shown.  So, don't slap God.  Don't worry.  Nestle yourself right down in the hollow of God's hand and try to discern the beating of God's heart, and breathe with it.

Journal Questions:
1.  It is widely believed that worry is something we learn from our parents.  Is that true of your experience?

2.  To what degree are your prayers "worry-based?"

3.  Do you practice any kind of "trusting God" forms of prayer?  If you'd like to share them here, please feel free!

Prayer:
God, we whole-heartedly put our complete trust in you, for we do affirm that our hearts are your heart and your heart is ours.  Through the name of Christ.  Amen.