Worrywarts unite!

When I hear today’s scripture, I don’t know if I’m the best person to preach on this or the worst!  I am a first class worrywart of the strongest kind.  This was a part of me even before I became a mom, a job that is almost inherently worry-filled.  When Tim and I were travelling on our honeymoon, I worried if we would have a roof over our heads in the next town or if we would run out of money, or whether we would have jobs when we got back to Alberta and so on.  You name it, I would worry about it.  Once I had little ones, I read as much as I could on how to be the perfect parent.  You know you are a world-class worrying mom when you obsess about peer pressure and drug habits in high schools when your child is still in diapers! It’s a wonder my kids turned out as well as they did.  Thank goodness their dad was more relaxed.

This scripture, our Thanksgiving reading of Matthew, "be like the birds of the air or the flowers" was one I had a hard time with.  Did Jesus want us all to become flower children of the sixties, going around and telling everyone to chill out, or as someone said to me the other day, ‘chillax’?  Go with the flow man, everything is far out, dude.  Well, I was not a teen ager in the sixties, I was more like Michael J. Fox’s character Alex Keaton in Family Ties, who carried a briefcase and was very different than his hippie parents. But I would have been very sceptical of anyone telling me, the way Jesus seems to be, that worrying is not the way to live life.  Try telling that to Syrian refugees or protestors in Turkey or people with disabilities trying to make it on a small pension.  But it is one thing to plan for the future and another thing to obsess about it.

Neuroscientists would side Jesus.  Worrying has a negative impact on brain chemistry, especially obsessive fretting about things we can’t control.  Trying to be thankful can actually help promote healthier brains than worrying will.  And so many times in my life, the stuff I spent hours fussing about were in the long run not worth the time and trouble I gave them.  Do the kids remember if I ran out of bandages on our camping trip in 2005? Heck, even I don’t remember if we went camping in 2005.  It has not added to my enjoyment of my life, my family or even my spiritual growth. 

I think I would agree with Jesus that worrying does not improve my spiritual life one little iota!  What it does do is focus my mind on things I cannot control, in the hopes that I can somehow prevent or change them.  Isn’t that a definition of insanity, trying to control those things we can’t control?  Worrying also says to me that I do not and cannot trust myself to deal with reality.  The future will always be terrifying and I will fall to pieces when that terrible future finally arrives.

So when I worry, I am focussing on fear and control.  Jesus says that I cannot do that, I cannot have two masters.  I can have God as my focus, or I can have the future as my focus, but I can’t have both.  My worry is actually a barrier between myself and God.  Being a worrywart is incompatible with being a pilgrim follower of Jesus. 

Now, I dare say Jesus would not want us to throw our lot with people who don’t think about the future at all.  There is certainly the story of Jesus telling his disciples to get him a donkey to ride into Jerusalem that sounds like he had arranged it ahead of time and gave them the password to use if the owners had any questions.  And he did prepare his disciples for the fact that he would be executed as a traitor to the state before they ever arrived in Jerusalem.  As one mentor of mine said, “Trust in God but tie up your camel”. 

Even so, we can say to ourselves that we are not going to let this habit of worrying spoil our lives.  It is a habit that can be transformed in simple ways.  One powerful tool is to recite the Serenity Prayer to ourselves when we are fretting.  Written by one of the most important American theologians as a way to cope with life during the dirty 30’s, his prayer to accept the things that we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference, is a spiritual practise that can help us to be more thankful.  Taking time to discern if the thing we are worrying about is something we can change or not is the first step towards letting go of our anxiety.

Writing things down helps.  When I read my old diaries, I can see how the things I worried about resolved in surprising ways.  Find a prayer practise that helps you get calm, as simple as singing your favorite hymn or walking the labyrinth or some other calming practise.  Give your worries to God.  Say, “God, this is too big for me, please deal with it how you think best.” And join together in community to share stories of thanksgiving, of resiliency, of prayers answered or worries unfounded.  When we join with our brothers and sisters of faith, we can rise above our fears and worries to live in the memory of Jesus.  After all, he faced the worst that humanity can experience without it ending his dream and purpose for a new kind of world where all can practise thanksgiving prayers and kindness to one another.  In the end it’s not about what we can do, it’s remembering to ask God for the gifts of serenity, courage and wisdom. God will give us what we need to get through another day. May it be so for us all.

What’s Prayer Got To Do With It?

What’s Prayer Got To Do With It?

You know, there are a lot of dead souls out there, wandering through life living with obsessions and fears and grudges and resentments and depression.  They do not know how to feel joy, but boy, they are good at keeping a grudge going.  Ask them if they are nice friendly people, they would probably agree they were, but if you let them talk, you may find they are fixated with the horrible person who stabbed them in the back or who is a terrible neighbor or just rubs them the wrong way.

They are in the habit of criticising their neighbors, usually behind the neighbors’ backs, and it is not nice to hear them go after someone.  And yet it is so easy to do.  Just ask me about the last time we replaced the fence between our house and the neighbor’s house, and how we ended up solving our dispute about what kind of paint to use.  I’m no saint, and I can still foam at the mouth at the thought of the ‘latex vs oil’ debate that never did get resolved.

So when I hear the disciples grousing about the guy down the road from them who is casting out demons in Jesus’ name, something that earlier in the chapter, they were not able to do, I can really relate.  Especially in a town with lots of different churches.  It’s so tempting to think that we do church better than ‘them’ whoever ‘them’ might happen to be.  But annoyingly, Jesus doesn’t join their side in the resentment match.  “We’re better than he is,” doesn’t cut any dice with Jesus.  And he launches into a long lecture to remind them to keep their minds on the business at hand.  Don’t forget that you are to be salty, and undistracted from what is important, helping children not to stumble, helping community come together to make a difference in the world.  Be flavorful, zesty, tasty, seasoning for life.  Be the sparkle that makes others around us go, “Wow, I want some of that.”

That’s a big tall order.  How do we be zesty when we’re living the average life with the average challenges from family, neighbors, acquaintances and church community?  How do we be sparkling when we’re in the presence of that annoying so and so who goes out of his or her way to be deliberately annoying and vexatious?

That’s where I think the James reading is important.  What are we to be doing? Calling on Jesus name.  Reminding ourselves to pray.  Prayer?  Yikes!  I don’t know about you, but prayer is one of those things we don’t talk about, right up there with talking about sex, our bank accounts, politics and what kind of computer or phone is best.  Dangerous stuff.

And prayer is so nebulous.  It has a huge ‘ick’ factor for many people, who think about prayer as something a ‘holy roller’ kind of guru does.  I must admit that I never gave prayer much thought when I was growing up.  Wasn’t that something that kids were supposed to do on their knees in their nightshirts right before bed?  What if the floor was cold? What if my knees were bony?  So pretty much as soon as I was old enough to get an understanding that there was something called prayer, I was rejecting it as hard work.  Then there were the gurus that apparently could sit cross-legged in the lotus position chanting ‘om’ for hours at a time.  Boring!  Why do that when there was so much more interesting stuff in the world like root beer floats or ice cream sundaes or even boys?

Then there were the embarrassing people who went on and on about how their prayers fixed their lives and made all their dreams come true.  The people who put ads in the paper, like one I remember reading in the 1980’s, “Thank you God for my Mercedes”, or the athletes who thanked God for their Grey Cup touchdown, and so on.  Really?  God gave you a Mercedes?  Why? 

Couldn’t God give the people on Boyle Street a ham sandwich then?  Wouldn’t 5 thousand ham sandwiches do more good?  So praying for stuff seemed pretty silly or selfish or some combination of that.  And it doesn’t help that James makes it sound like all our problems will be solved if we pray.  Jesus prayed that he might not be crucified, and look at how that turned out.

So how do we look at prayer with modern eyes?  The neuroscientists are doing some interesting work on the power of our thoughts to impact our brain chemistry.  They report “The practise of Gratitude produces the same brain chemical as the antidepressant Wellbutrin, dopamine as well as doing what Prozac does, it boosts the neurotransmitter serotonin.  It’s not finding gratitude that matters most; it’s remembering to look in the first place. One study found that it actually affected neuron density in both the ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex.”

They have also found that labelling our negative emotions can lessen their impact.  When participants in a study were asked to name their emotion, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activated and reduced the emotional amygdala reactivity. In other words, consciously recognizing the emotions reduced their impact.  “Dear God, I am so angry at such and such” may actually calm us down.

Even the decision to turn something over to God can help our stress levels.  One of the most powerful prayers we can make is to say, “Oh God, this problem is too big for me.”  But James wants us not to pray just for the sake of ourselves but for our own community.  He wrote, “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.” And the you he used in Greek was plural.  Pray for each other so that your congregation, your fellowship, your community, your town will be healed. 

What would Athabasca really look like if we all prayed for every single person in it?  A wonderful place where every flavorful, salty person would be at peace with everyone else in one wonderful circle of love and fellowship.  Let us work and pray for that day to come.  Amen.