If you frequent this blog regularly you won’t be surprised when I tell you that I’m drafting a petition to change the name of Monday to Moanday. It’s a better fit, a more accurate portrayal of how many of us feel when the weekend disappears like a vapor trail and the workweek grind finds us again. Moandays are so unspectacular that I decided years ago that I would not take it as my day off as most pastors do. Why would I want to give my family such a spiceless day as Moanday? Nah, I give it to my administrative duties at the office and save Fabulous Fridays for my crew at home. In all of my normative disdain for Moandays I still want to ensure you that I believe my Bible when it speaks of there being sufficient grace for each day. Don’t email me – I already know that God is on His throne on Moandays. Don’t send me anonymous notes in the mail telling me that I’m a pastor and ought to do Moandays without murmuring or complaining. Methinks it suitable to allow the occasional reminder that I’m as capable as you folks are in dismissing all my rich, encouraging sermon material and ignoring everything I write in my blogs just to let out a big crybaby’s, “Waaaahhhh.”
“A man can no more take in a supply of grace for the future than he can eat enough for the next six months, or take sufficient air into his lungs at one time to sustain life for a week. We must draw upon God’s boundless store of grace from day to day, as we need it.” – D.L. Moody
Mr. Moody was a fruitful evangelist from yesteryear. Not known for his evangelistic emphasis on the doctrines of grace, ol’ Dwight sure nails the truth of sustaining grace in the above quote. He is saying that I have what I need on every day of the week but never have it the day before. If I feel I have it the day before I am mistaken because the grace that I have is only for the day that I have. I don’t have tomorrow today therefore I don’t have grace for tomorrow today. My mother taught me some really good things when I was a small boy. She placed a love for reading in me and helped me become quite good at it by age four. She helped me tap into some of my liberated thinking and, when God saved me in my early twenties, He taught me what part of that liberated thinking was worthy to retain and what part was better suited of a double-flush accompanied by a spray of air freshener. The one thing I wish Mom had not skillfully trained me in was the Art of Pessimism. Example: it is impossible for me to dismiss from my mind the conversation she had with me at age ten in which she declared that ALL people either have cavities or gum disease (no third option mentioned). I guess she wanted me to decide which of the two I would prefer. I picked periodontal trouble and have been a perennial success at chronically tender gums while deftly escaping cavities for the most part – see there, pessimism works!
I have a friend who pastors a church in England (not my world-renowned friend, David Price, but a different chap) who once let me know that I sounded like a “doom merchant” when forecasting the future in my sermons. I loved the sound of that phrase – Doom Merchant – so much that I found myself unable to feel too insulted by him attributing it to me. Yet later on it felt like God whispered in my ear that my friend, Jonathan, was accurate in his assault on my entrenched pessimism. I worried a little too much. I obsessed over the what-if’s more than I should have. The desire for a full explanation of the next six to eight weeks’ worth of trouble was something I thought would be beneficial for my mental well-being. I wondered on the present day why I didn’t feel good about the troubles of the forthcoming days. It has certainly taken some time but I can tell you that I believe that God has shepherded me around that sharp corner in my thinking. Risking the sound of boastfulness, I declare that I don’t think I’ve experienced prolonged fretting in quite some time now. I say with renwed optimism that…I’m cured (even though my inner Doom Merchant hisses, “Not sooooo fast, mister…”)
It feels good to leave the worrying to those who have determined to become expert at it. Honestly, I’m over it. It makes you think you are seeking to be “on top of things” and “acting in a mature fashion while exemplifying preparedness in an unstable environment”. I never much cared for worrying but, if I’m being transparent, I confess that I felt trapped within the tension of wanting to be responsible and slipping into to a pattern of trying to control the future. The Lord Jesus did away with that kind of approach to life as a viable option when He said, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” {Matthew 6:34}. So, to my fellow obsessaholics I raise a toast of room-temperature salt-water and say, “Here’s to worrying and all the good it has ever done us!” Let us spew out that brine together in unison.
Now that we have all been cured let us go and find some people to sign my petition regarding that aforementioned name change…
I once heard someone say, worry is the opposite of faith, therefore if you are worrying about something you are not having faith in God over the issue. Worrying then would be a sin for a Christian. Knowing this now helps me to put faith in the place of worry.
You are SO very funny, Jeff! Being personally acquainted with the origins of your doomsday preparedness, I very much enjoyed the humorous slant.
And it is a lie from hell itself…that worry is responsible productivity. Resting in God seems almost irreverent. Yet worry is self-willed departure from His instruction.
Perhaps I might finally begin to see worry for what is?..SIN! As much as other sins I so desperately forsook 3 and 1/2 years ago.
Whatever is not of faith, is sin. Worry would most definitely qualify.