Of all the debilitating emotions one can experience on a day to day basis, I suggest the most insidious is worry.
Jesus himself even chimed in on the subject once saying, and I paraphrase,
don’t worry…
See those brightly colored birds?…
They don’t worry…
and neither should you!
But, why shouldn’t we worry?
There’s certainly a crap-load of stuff to worry about: like health, relationships, loved ones, hated ones, the competition, global warming, Obama, ISIS, ebola, the coming apocalypse…I could of course go on.
When you step back and think about it, worry is a pretty useless pursuit.
Getting back to Jesus, I believe he also said that no short person ever grew an inch taller by worrying about it…or something to that effect.
And isn’t it so true?
So why do we do it?
In my case at least, I always seem to worry about me. The focal point of worrying might seem at its surface to be otherwise directed, but it usually all comes back to me.
If I am worried about, say, my marriage…it is about how a potential split-up might affect me.
If I am worried about the health of some person near and dear to me, at the heart of that worry is not them, but how losing them might make me feel.
If I were genuinely concerned, then I would stop worrying and take some type of action that might benefit them. But I don’t because my incessant worrying isn’t about them at all, it’s about me.
You’ll never make an impact by worrying about it.
Worry is self-indulgence.
It’s a state in which we become literally paralyzed with nail-biting self-concern.
Yet it feels a little self-comforting because we rationalize that it’s not about us…it’s about being concerned over something or some person. But again, what makes you think that spending time worrying about them is really about them?
Is it doing them any good?
Will it solve their problem? Will it cure the cancer, help them out of a financial disaster, or help their kid get off of drugs?
No…it won’t do any of those things. All it will do is slightly appease your sense of dutiful concern.
If you’ve acknowledged that there’s a problem and you’re sincerely concerned, spend time thinking about what you could actually do, then the rest of the time doing it and not one second of time worrying about it.
You might not be able to solve the problem, but you can do a lot more to make some positive impact by selfless action than you can by selfish worrying.
You can do a lot more to make some positive impact by selfless action than you can by selfish worrying.
To stop being a worry wart and start doing is to prioritize impact over self-interest.
Don’t believe me?…just ask Jesus.
Oh, he also said that worrying implies an absence of faith.
That’s another big problem with being a worry wart.
So, don’t worry about it!
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