Lynn Jones: The threat of worry
By Lynn Jones
Jonathan Swift told a classic tale in Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver was a normal-size man who arrived in the land of Lilliput. This land was inhabited by tiny people who were so small that Gulliver could hold several of them in his hand. They were absolutely no threat to him.
After a while, however, Gulliver went to sleep on the shore of Lilliput. When he did so, a great crowd of Lilliputians came, stretched tiny threads across him, and tied him to the ground. When Gulliver awoke, he discovered that he could not move. There were so many threads across him that he could not break them.
Sometimes our worries do that to us. A single one of them could not do it alone. Singly they are very slight, but stretch them all across us, and they bind us to the point that they enslave us.
Worry is a persistent enemy with which we battle. Soren Kierkegaard observed that no enemy knows how to attack more skillfully than anxiety. No lawyer knows how to interrogate the accused better than anxiety interrogates us.
We wrestle with worry all the days of our lives. Being a Christian does not put us off-limits to anxiety. Paul confessed that in his own life. In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul told of all the external threats that he had faced in his life. He listed such things as beatings, shipwrecks, dangers on the roads, hunger, thirst, and cold. Then, he listed another burden– “the care of all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28). That burden of care, which occasionally slipped over into worry and anxiety about those churches, was likely the heaviest burden of all.
With worry, we are always projecting the worst upon the future. As someone has said, “Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.” That kind of interest rate will soon bankrupt you.
Bruce Larson pointed to the contrast between two statues on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The first was a statue of Atlas located in the RCA Building. The statue depicted Atlas as a powerful man straining to carry the world upon his shoulders. On the other side of the street, there was a statue of the boy Jesus located in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. The statue depicted Jesus as a small boy, with no effort at all, holding the world in one hand.
After examining the contrasts between those two statues, Larson concluded, “We have a choice. We can carry the world on our shoulders, or we can say, ‘I give up, Lord; here’s my life. I give you my world, the whole world.’”
That’s what we need to do today, place our worries and our world into the hand of Jesus and trust Him to carry them. As the Bible invites us, “Cast all your care on him because He cares for you” (1 Pet. 5:7).
Lynn Jones is a retired pastor who lives in Oxford. He does supply preaching for churches in his area and often serves as an interim pastor. Jones is also an author, has written two books and writes a weekly newspaper column. He may be contacted at: kljones45@yahoo.com.
