Don't Worry. Just Keep Asking!

Asking 2

"The Lord will make a way somehow When beneath the cross I bow, He will take away each sorrow, Let Him have your burdens now;  When the load bears down so heavy, The weight is shown on my brow, There's a sweet relief in knowing, O The Lord will make a way somehow."

Like an ice compress on a fevered brow or a cool breeze wafting through an open window, songs bring solace.  Songs assure respite.  They record history and repeat excerpts from a scribe's journal.  Yet, since childhood, worry has been my closest, most dependable friend.  More than songs.  My BFF.  Ruefully I'll admit, if I didn't have anything to worry about, I'd worry about its absence.  Despite my Mother's lived-in advice: "If you worry, don't pray.  If you pray, don't worry," I seemed unable to quiet those fits of anxiety.  

If "Acute Distress" had held a seat on the Stock Market, I would've been comfortably ensconced in it.  

Yes, I'd read volumes on how not to worry and listened to testimonies about being freed from the scourge of worry.  It didn't matter.  Worry was my unbreakable nail-biting habit, my sleepless nights of tossing and twisting, and my infallible Go-To.  To say I was a messy, tangled skein of yarn minimizes my addiction.  

Until I truthfully admitted WORRY served as my uncut heroin, my "blunt, (a term I learned from a grandson), and my childhood Linus Blanket.  Addicted, I craved the "high" of wondering, speculating, conjecturing, and imagining something, anything on which to alight, like a butterfly flittering about a colorful garden.  I couldn't break free from this insidious, debilitating habit alone.  That's how deeply ingrained and reflexive worry had grown.

"Why should I feel discouraged, Why should the shadows come, Why should my heart be lonely And long for heav'n and home, When Jesus is my portion? My constant friend is He: His eye is on the sparrow, And I know He watches me.  I sing because I'm happy, I sing because I'm free, For His eye is on the sparrow, And I know He watches me!"

Years ago an upbeat ditty advised,  "Don't worry, be happy." Seemingly simplistic, those four words carried the power of a nuclear detonation.  Don't. Worry. Be.  Happy.  An unbearable undertaking if toted alone.  Surrendering worry required help, supernatural help.  Yet, Jesus promises in Mark 11:23 "Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him."

Eventually, I learned to rest in Him.  To return to Scripture when the Worry Ogre tried stealthily to return.  Scripture serves as a spiritual crowbar I use to dig up the taproot of worry and throw into the Sea of Forgetfulness. With ever subsequent attempt.  So...

"I've a message from the Lord, Hallelujah! A message, oh, my friends for you; It's recorded in His Word, Hallelujah, Jesus said it and I know tis true.  Look and live, my brother, live; Look for Jesus now and live; It's recorded in His Word, Hallelujah, And it's only that you look and live."