What I'm giving up for lent.

I have given up worry for lent.

It’s a good time to give up worry. Maybe if I can refuse to worry in this season in my life, I will successfully give it up forever! It’s allowed, you know. Jesus said it. Paul said it. 

It feels so responsible to worry. Like it’s the adult, reasonable thing to do. I have been very good at this, all my life. The muscles in my neck and shoulders solve the problems of the world and take care of people in distant countries. They pay my bills and fear for the heartbreaks and challenges my children face. During the wee hours of the morning, my racing heart runs into the future and attempts to barricade it from danger.

And nothing happens. 

It’s a shadow world, worry. A hiss of a lie that says we have control. Wasted emotion and breath spent on possibility, spent on nothing, really. When I worry, I cannot create freely or enjoy my days.

(Full disclosure as always: I have an anxiety disorder and I am not saying that mental illness can simply be willed away. For my anxiety I have medicine, herbs (rhodiola rosea and valerian root- highly recommend), strict sleep, and a careful diet. With all of this I can live without too much of the dreadful body-shaking, heart-palpitating, drums of doom anxiety, but I still can worry, on top of it. If you suspect you have something more serious going on, you need to address that first. I am also definitely not suggesting that there should be shame mixed in with worry, or that by giving up worry (attempting to give up worry) I am giving up fierce desire or action steps for justice for those who don’t have it. Just giving up worry. Just stopping the fretting. Just ceasing to attempt to control those things that I cannot control.)

So then, on the other side, you have Jesus, cheerfully telling us not to worry. Worry for nothing. Tomorrow is only a phantom, he says. You haven’t even stepped into it! It could be wonderful, full of beauty and joy, and you are afraid of it! (I’m paraphrasing.) 

How can he be so glib? Doesn’t he know?

He knows.

He also knows that I am pretty teeny tiny compared to the swirl of energy and complexity that God inhabits all the time. Cellular creation, the song of stars, the effortless dance of the trinity.

I am like a kid who thinks I need to run the house. But smaller. Hmm… I am like an ant trying to tell NASA how to fly. Worrying about whether the engines can hold those astronauts up, my little ant arms and legs tense with fear.

Deciding not to worry is choosing to invest in trust, rather than wasting my days on fear. At the heart of this choice is a simple truth: I am not God. I do not need to be God. I do not need to responsibly go over the facts again and again. (I miss the most important things anyway, I would be terrible at God’s job.) 

Instead, I have this sweet permission: To be who I actually am in the scheme of things—child, along for the ride in the sleepy sunshine of the backseat of the car. I have permission to not know, to throw my heart into things without fear that I will ruin everything. I have permission to play, to wait, to receive. Your father knows what you need. 

You are allowed to let go of worry. You have this sweet permission, to live in a place where your father knows what you need. It doesn’t mean that things will be easy, it only means that God is God and you are you and you can sleep at night because you have no control over any of it anyway. It is a good and terrifying place to be. Stepping out of fear and into trust is like stepping out of a cage and into a maelstrom, but you can certainly enjoy the wild wind a little more if your hands are not clenched tight.