This morning in my Bible study (I’m working back through Beth Moore’s Esther study right now) I found that I’d written this under one of the session guides (not sure if it’s a direct quote or idea quote): “We can never fret our way to victory.”
I needed this reminder. I’ve been thinking a lot about worry lately. When we first moved into our house 7 years ago–I can’t believe we’ve been living her this long! My military brat sensibilities are horribly offended. ;)–we were told we’d need to replace our furnace. I’ve heard several horror stories about the expense/hassle of replacing a furnace. And especially since we spend more money than I care to think about on my health issues, we’re constantly pinching pennies, so frankly, I’ve been worrying about how we could afford to replace our furnace for 7 years. It’s not something I thought about every day, but it came to mind off and on, especially the first time we would use it for the season and then on really cold days. Well, in March-ish of last year, we had an energy audit thing and were informed that we probably qualified for a grant to replace our furnace (it’s 30 years old) and do a bunch of other work we need to get done, but haven’t because of the expense. Unfortunately, the whole thing took until about a month ago for us to actually find out that we got the grant and for the process to begin. I can’t tell you how much I regretted all that wasted worry–so much emotional energy and God worked it all out without any help from me 🙂
We were scheduled to begin work on Monday of this week, but sadly, it did not happen. On Thursday of the prior week, my husband was doing some work in our crawl space and it was super muddy, so he called the contractor who came out and looked at the crawl space and informed us that we’re looking at many thousands of dollars of work that has to be done before they can do the work the grant covers–and that work isn’t covered by any grants. Um, maybe you guys haven’t picked up on this, but I’m kind of a control freak and things like suddenly finding out we have to come up with thousands of dollars kind of throws me for a loop–especially since I’ve been worrying that we need to replace our cars this year (we’re almost at 300,000 miles on both our cars; I don’t think they’ll last much longer).
Anyway, all that wasted worry about the furnace and re-reading this statement reminded me that worry is not the way to go. God has control of things. He hasn’t forgotten us. He’s always provided for us, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually, etc., no matter what’s going on in our lives. It’s as silly for me to worry about the basement and the furnace and our cars as it is for my kids to freak out because they’re worried I’m going to forget to feed them dinner. So new goal: retrain my mind so that worry becomes a prompt to make an automatic mental U-turn.
