Have you any worries? Most of us go through life with one or more worries nagging us all the time. And if we sit back and count our worries, we find even more.
They may be big worries, connected with our own life, our health, our family, our relationships, the world around us. They may be small worries, about whether there is enough milk in the fridge or enough money in the bank, whether we owe someone a letter, about the weather for our planned barbecue. They may be worries about what other people are thinking.
As Christians, we all know that we should follow the advice of the well-known chorus. We should count our blessings, one by one. We should certainly not count our worries. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his hearers not to care about the next day - it would take care of itself. "Do not be anxious," he repeated (Mt.6:25 and 6:31!).
Stop worrying! Doesn't it sound like one of the things more easily said than done - like loving our neighbours! Yet freedom from worry stands at the heart of the gospel. It ties in with trust and obedience. Very often we worry about ourselves, our own priorities, and rightly so. It is right to care for ourselves, just as we need to care for our neighbours.
Worrying about other people is to stand on the threshold of prayer. We do well if we worry more about others than about ourselves. And it is not always selfish if we worry, too, about ourselves. Selfish worry is worry about not getting what we want.
We often make plans and projects for ourselves (and for those around us!) with the best intention of carrying them out. They may well be unselfish plans - giving up smoking, lending a helping hand to that cousin we can't stand, finishing our housework or our homework, tidying our room. But for one reason or another we fail to carry them out.
Paul remarked on this to the Romans. "I do not do the things I want, I do the things I hate," he worried, and echoed a saying of Jesus ("the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"). "With my mind I serve the law of God, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin." (Rm 7:25). (This does not mean that "spiritual things" are good, while fleshly, carnal things are bad. For in Jesus God "became flesh". Things are only bad when they threaten to take us over, when we use them selfishly.)
And St Augustine (who told us that if we had enough love for our neighbour, we could do what we pleased) wisely remarked that the freedom Jesus has brought us is "the freedom not to do the things we want to do," - a freedom from selfishness, and from selfish worries.
If our eyes are on Jesus - and on our neighbours - there is no need for worry. God has a task for each one of us, but it is an easy one ("My yoke is light" (Mt 11:30)). God is infinitely patient, and when we fall, picks us up and lets us start afresh. There is no pit of worry so deep that God cannot pull us out and let us start anew. Again, and again, and again.
HD