I Rarely Worry About the Right Things

I’ve been thinking about worry tonight.

I've never thought it was particularly useful. Tonight I feel that to my core. Worry doesn't change what happens. It doesn't give us more control, although I think sometimes we behave as if it does.

And lately I've noticed something else. I rarely seem to worry about the right things.

When I think about the things that have really changed my life, most of them weren't things I'd spent any time worrying about beforehand. My sister getting sepsis certainly wasn't. And neither was coming back to the Forever House this week to discover that the life I thought I was returning to wasn't the life waiting for me.

I hadn't imagined those conversations or spent time wondering what I would do if suddenly everything changed.

And yet it did.

So...I've been thinking about all the things I did worry about over the years. How many of them happened? How many mattered six months later? How many hours did I spend thinking about things I couldn't control anyway? (Note to self: one day when breathing feels normal again, I need to talk about the Wednesday box.)

Anywho. Here's the really interesting part.

When I thought about the things that had tipped my life sideways without warning, somehow I navigated them. I didn't have a plan for sepsis, but when my sister got sick, I got on a plane. We asked questions, learned things none of us wanted to know and figured out what needed to happen next. I didn't have a plan for coming home to a life that suddenly looked completely different either, but I'm probably gonna figure that one out too.

Maybe that's what worry gets wrong. It assumes we need to know what's coming in order to be okay when it gets here. And our lives give us plenty of evidence that we don't. We respond. We learn. We ask for help. We change direction. We do the next thing and then the next. Sometimes we even surprise ourselves at how well we navigate the unexpected!

So if worry isn't actually protecting us from the things that tip us sideways, what is it doing?

I think it's stealing joy.

We worry about next month while sitting across the table from someone we love today. We worry about something going wrong on the trip while we're actually on the trip. We worry about losing something while we still have it. We give away pieces of a perfectly good present to futures that may never happen.

That's a terrible trade.

And I think underneath worry is something else too: the idea that we have more control than we actually do. I believe there is a plan bigger than mine. That doesn't mean I always understand the plan. Right now, I'm not even particularly happy with it. But if I believe there is something larger at work, then maybe part of choosing joy is knowing when I've done what I can do and letting go of the rest.

That's much easier to write than it is to do, by the way.

I'm writing this from the cutest little 1900s Airbnb cabin tucked in Underwood Hills. It's this tiny old cabin nestled between much newer homes, close enough to the neighbors that their side yard is basically my front yard.

A couple nights ago, I was crying on the porch when one of those neighbors invited me to come sit with him by his firepit. Today, his wife knocked on the door with a friend and cookies. She asked if they could pray for me. I told her I wasn't ready for that yet. I needed to make peace with God in my own time.

But I could eat her cookies.

So we sat there and talked. And somewhere in the conversation, we discovered one of those crazy connections that makes the world suddenly feel very small. One of her best friends and one of my best friends were best friends. These strangers who had walked through my door weren't quite as random as they'd seemed five minutes earlier.

Some people call those things coincidences. I call them God winks. And sitting there with these women and their cookies, I felt one. Nothing has been fixed. I still don't know what is going to happen next and I still have some things I want to work out with God. But I know something I didn't know when I was crying the night before.

And maybe I don't need to know anything more than that yet. I don't need to anticipate every turn in the road. Apparently I'm not very good at that anyway. LOL.

I am pretty good at paying attention to what is actually happening. I can act when there is something I can do. I can trust myself to navigate the things I don't see coming. And I can trust that perhaps the plan is bigger than the small piece of it I can see today.

Because worry won't give me control over tomorrow. It can only take joy away from today.

And today, God sent cookies.