Anxious Living – Sunday, January 24, 1982
“There is such a thing as taking ourselves and the world too seriously, or at any rate too anxiously,”1 observed Henry Van Dyke. The song says, “We find them happy which endure in patience.” Yet enduring to the end gives us a lot of worry. It seems, in fact, that worry is one of the great human pastimes. Indeed, we hardly consider ourselves fully responsible if we aren’t worried about something. There is the constant anxiety about our performance, if we can measure up in what sometimes seems like an endless contest.
Now some believe there is a majesty in misery, a nobility in worry, thinking it is God’s best way of disciplining His children. The question for us is, “Is that really so?”
It was R. W. Dale who said, “We do not please God more by eating bitter ales than by eating honey. A cloudy, foggy, rainy day is not more heavenly than a day of sunshine. A funeral march is not so much like the music of angels as the songs of birds on a May morning. There is no more religion in the gaunt, naked forest in winter than in the laughing blossoms of the spring and the rich, ripe fruits of auturnn.”2
Why do we get gloominess mixed up with glory, thinking that endless fussing and anxiety adds to our performance? It is not the Lord’s doing. The image of the gloomy Christian has been with us too long. The idea of the stressful soul being the only successful soul has deceived us.
The Lord is not the one who introduced woe into the world. It came from another author.
God is purity and light, often the only source of sweetness in a world that seems too much for us. When He asks us to endure, it is to give us the courage against caving into unhappiness.
Even the natural world reflects His goodness. When the January world is an unrelenting gray, the bulbs of spring are already preparing to send forth their blossoms. Even when the sun is about to leave us in the evening, it does so in a dazzle of color.
So, if life seems anxious and serious, it may be that we, ourselves, are taking it too anxiously, too seriously in some vain effort to be better or please the Lord. We are fooled if we look for God’s hand only in the lightning and not in the sunlight. If we miss happiness along the way, we’ve missed it all.
1 As quoted in “Happiness”” Leaves of Gold, Lytle, Clyde Francis, Edit. The Coslett Publishing Company, pg. 81.
2 Lytle, pg. 83.
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January 24, 1982
Broadcast Number 2,736