Luke 21:34 "Watch out! Don't let your hearts be dulled by carousing and drunkenness, and by the worries of this life. Don't let that day catch you unaware."
My Thoughts
WOW! Worry is right up there with carousing and drunkenness!! I don't carouse and I don't drink...so I was feeling pretty good about myself..then I got to the worries of this life part!!!... Boy, oh Boy did that take me down a notch or ten!! I was taught that if you were not worried about something that it didn't matter to you... or that you didn't care about it... or you didn't care about another person if you didn't worry. Worry made me a "good" person. Oh yes it ate me up...made me some days where I couldn't even function...but it "made me good!" I have actually gotten in trouble as a child for not worrying about something enough. Which probably meant that somebody wanted me to make more of an effort..but in my mind it translated to actual worry. Have any of you felt that same way?
So today I started to think...ponder how worry was like being dulled by carousing and drunkenness... if you think about it it has so many of the same effects. It dulls our senses, it separates us from God, it makes us make bad choices... How does it make us make bad choices you ask... well so many times when we worry we look for solutions...then we act on the first solution that comes along without care for the consequences of that solution... it puts us in such a state that we can't think clearly.... it makes us act selfishly... it keeps our minds on us instead of on others... so often when we worry we don't go to God because we are too busy trying to fix the problem on our own.... when we are chronic worriers we find things to worry about that don't even exist.... and if you were raised like me...and so many of us were... we worry to feel good about ourselves... sounds a lot like people who drink too much to me. When we worry we often times make problems where there were none.
In all the times that I sit and confess my sins by name...I have never listed worry. I don't drink because I have seen what drinking does to family members...I would never married a drinker...my kids even knew that them drinking would be the one thing that would break my heart... I taught them that alcoholism ran in our family so they had to be very careful!... then I turned around and taught them to worry!!
This is a sin that will take me time to conquer... it is something that I will have to really work hard on... but I can! Little by little I can get better about worry!!! I can start by being aware and confessing it as a sin. It is one of those sins that once you conquer it will make life so much better!! The rewards of not sinning by worrying will far outweigh anything I think I can accomplish with worry! God is so good to teach us what what is good for us and what isn't..he does this because he love us so much!! Here he is telling us that worry is bad... it is actually a sin... it is something that will keep our mind off what God wants us to accomplish!
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