26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
Mat. 6:26-27
The other day I was backing up my wife’s car and failed to see another driver zipping through the parking lot. As I was slowly pulling out, the brakes on my car suddenly slammed and the other driver sailed on by unscathed. Turns out, Patty’s car has this neat little feature that uses the backup camera to not only see what you fail to see but protects you from your blind spots that you would otherwise miss. Not all these technological advancements are such a bad thing!
There are so many things in life that could potentially go wrong! Just open your news feed and take a look. All the headlines predicting the next looming crisis. And the thought crosses my mind, if we could just see into the future a bit more, maybe we could avoid the mistakes, control the outcomes, and prevent the potential disasters looming all around us.
If you’re like me, you try to do just that. You try to predict and anticipate all the things that might go wrong. To create strategies for what you’ll do if such and such happens. I can so easily live in this world of hypotheticals and pretend that I might just worry my way, finally, into peace.
Which is, of course, ridiculous. We know this, but it doesn’t stop us. We worry our way, not into a sense of assurance, but instead, into the deep pit of anxiety. And the cost is massive. It costs us the greatest treasure of all…this present moment. Worrying cannot add even an hour to your life.
What we need is to shift our gaze away from the hypothetical fears to what is right before our eyes. To the beauty all around us. To the birds and the flowers. Jesus points these out to his disciples and I think he would point us to them as well. Not the idea of flowers and birds, but that one right there. That sunflower that just opened up in our garden. That little pod of dolphins swimming by. All this beauty around us is to remind us of our value. And to remind us that life is always right here and right now.
We have a God who sees so much more than we do. He sees our blind spots, and our vulnerabilities, and all that could go wrong. And he whispers reassurance. Jesus says, “your heavenly Father knows that you need them.”
I read a quote from Dale Carnegie that I found so helpful. Maybe you’ve heard it before? “Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.”
This Sunday we’re talking about worry. But really, we’re talking about focus. Setting our minds on the things that matter most frees us to experience the richness of life that we otherwise get distracted from. Jesus came to give us abundant life, not just someday, but here and now. A life of deep trust, not in our self-preservation, but the strong arms of our heavenly Father.