“You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you,
because he trusts in you.” – Isaiah 26:3 (ESV)
When we worry, we’re essentially telling God, “Lord, I’ve got this situation going on and the truth is that I really can’t trust you to take care of it.”
And God gives us that option to hold onto whatever is troubling us. He’s never going to force us to do anything we don’t want to do. And so we take this worry or that worry with us everywhere we go. It’s with us as soon as we wake up in the morning. It’s with us during our commute to work. It’s with us and distracting us while we’re working. It’s with us when we get home and stealing our joy during our time with family. We take it to bed with us. We even snuggle it under the covers and have nightmares about it after we’ve finally gone to sleep. The cycle of worry never ends.
But God doesn’t require this. In fact, He doesn’t want us to live this way. He wants us to trust Him. He wants us to hand our fears and worries over to Him. He wants to be the focus, so that we can rest in His perfect peace.
We have the ability to control what we will think. Every person has the ability to say, “I will think about something else” and then refocus the mind on something positive, productive, and pleasing to God.
Any child of God who takes a willful stand against thoughts that are clearly harmful is going to be provided a way of escape from that circumstance. God will help us refocus our minds on something other than our problems or wrong thinking.
We just have to be willing to take that first step and trust that God has everything under control.
Former Blackout Artist 