Worry & Trust

// Matthew 6:27 // Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? //

Side Thought #1:  There is a footnote on this verse that says "Or single cubit to his height".  As a vertically challenged person (fine, call it "short" if you must), somehow that has always spoken louder to me. :)

I was sending an email to a good friend (about worry and stress and trusting God) a week and a bit ago when this verse popped back into my head, and it has been stuck there ever since!  In the email, my focus was encouraging her, but I think the lesson was mainly for me.

I don't know about you guys, but worry and stress come pretty easily to me.

Trusting God on the other hand... hasn't always been the easiest.

Another important thing that I should mention from the email is that I formed a bit of an analogy about the process (for lack of a better word) of trusting God.

Side Thought #2:  I love, love, love analogies and metaphors!  I'm just warning you.  I'm sure it will come up again in the future.

It goes something like this...

Picture your ability (this is important later) to trust God as the foundation layer on a pyramid.

Every time you trust God with something, it add's a block to your pyramid (big thing=big block, little thing=little block).

Also important for this process, any time that your trust has a positive effect (in my mind, this means anything that makes me want to praise God.  Ex: peace, God-incidence, confidence, etc.), that block gets added to your foundation.

Now, the reason that I said "ability" before is that if you make a habit of trusting God and seeing/feeling the results of that, you will get a pretty nice foundation.  But if you don't... well... I picture it something like this:

Okay, now picture that you come across some medium-big sized worry that you want to trust God with.  Say it looks something like this...

Side Thought #3: I remember "Paint" being a much more awesome than this...

If you have not developed your "trust foundation", you will have a hard time trusting God with this worry.  You will be pushing your ability beyond what it is prepared for.

But on the other hand, if you have built a foundation, that worry is super easy to trust God with!  No problem, it's not even that big of a worry from this point of view.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have the latter.

Side Thought #4: I feel it's important to reiterate that my focus here is on the perspective of how easy or hard it is to surrender something to God.  NOT whether he can handle it or not, because that visual looks like this...

(And that's obviously not to scale, because it it were all you would see is an ittybitty portion of the top of God's box since it would stretch infinitely in all directions.  This post is already long -- an infinite God box would have been a little ridiculous, don't you think?)

So that has been my challenge.  When I find myself worrying about anything, big or small, I give it to God, because I know that he can handle it, and that I will be amazed at how he turns it into praise, and that experiencing him work will make it easier to trust him again, because I know that he can handle it, and lather-rinse-repeat.

I think that's pretty cool.