Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Hi, I’m Curtis, and I’m a worryholic.
That’s the way I’d introduce myself at a 12-step program for worriers and anxiety addicts. And maybe there are some. Programs for worriers, I mean. I should check on this.
But come to think of it, I’m already involved in one. It’s called the church. Not everyone there is a worrier, but more than a few fit the bill: People just like me who wage a daily battle with worry and are as prone to reach for it as an alcoholic is to reach for a bottle when stress piles up. Or when the sun comes up.
We read the Apostle Paul’s command, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6), but we botch it so often that we’re tempted to despair.
We worry about worrying. If we suddenly stopped worrying, the truly wonderful feeling would also be so completely foreign to us that we’d begin to worry that not worrying could be dangerous. And there we’d go again.
For some of us, it would be real progress if we could say with Charlie Brown, “I’ve adopted a new philosophy: I only dread one day at a time.”
Oh, for a few days (or minutes), I can almost follow the divine injunction: “Have no anxiety about anything ....” I’m best at it when I’m asleep, or, this works for me, when I’m singing.
I’ve even had times when I thought it might be more than half true perhaps a little more than half of the time to say that, as I’m getting older, maybe in some areas I’m learning to deal with worry at least a little better than I once did. (But those “mights” and “maybes” don’t sound very encouraging, do they?)
Too often I find myself again waking up wallowing in worry, and any idea of slight progress melts like morning dew. It was mostly an illusion, and once again, I’m one of a multitude of casualties in the war with worry.
Pick any front in the war. Satan can lob anxiety missiles our way from any number of directions.
Finances. Groceries and gas. Your “out-go” is going up at a rate steadily ahead of your income. (I worry about choking on a corn chip from a bag that costs almost $6. I think I’d be less likely to strangle on chips from a $3 bag.)
Marriage. Mars and Venus sometimes wobble in marital orbits. Collisions, almost cosmic, can happen.
Work. Can’t live with it. Can’t live without it. You love it. You hate it. You ... worry about it.
Parenthood. The worries popping up in this most fertile field for anxiety are perennials.
Health. The doc says you must de-stress, a prescription almost guaranteed to induce in most mortals more distress.
But Jesus’ words are both loving and wise when he tells us, “Do not worry about your life” (Matthew 6:24a).
St. Paul not only commands, “Don’t be anxious,” he says, “Pray!” And he adds a great promise: “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7).
God’s promised peace, the real thing and not our feeble attempts at counterfeit calm, is exactly the strong “guard” lots of us need in the battle. Each day. Each moment.
Curtis Shelburne writes about faith for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:
