Don’t Worry

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:6-7

AS PARENTS, we tend to worry about many things. We worry about the safety of our children on the road, at school —really anywhere, anytime. We worry about their physical, emotional, and spiritual health. We worry about their relationships, accomplishments, and competence now and in the future. We also worry about whether we’re doing a good job as parents —if we’re seeing the real issues or if we’re overreacting or underreacting to circumstances in our children’s lives. We worry about how much time our kids will have to spend in counseling to get over the way they were parented!

We tend to justify our anxiety by seeing it as an indication of how much we love our children, when actually it is an indication of how little we trust our God.

Fortunately, God doesn’t simply instruct us not to worry. We’re given an alternative —prayer. Every time we wake up in the middle of the night and catch ourselves beginning to rehearse all of our “what-ifs” and imagine the worst outcomes, we can turn those worries into prayers. We can lay our fears before our heavenly Father, who has us, and our children, in his hands. As we rehearse his goodness, faithfulness, and power in our prayers, we find that anxiety takes a backseat to hope.

This chapter also gives us something else to think about —an alternative to feeding on anxiety-producing thoughts. “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise” (verse 8). Instead of filling our thoughts with imagined fears, we can fix our thoughts on what is true rather than what might come true, what is pure rather than what might defile, what is admirable rather than what is troubling.

God, I really don’t want to feed my worries about ________. I want to be faithful to pray for ________. I believe that you are able to give me peace even when everything in ________’s life might not be what I want it to be. I want your peace to guard my heart from fear and my mind from worry as I live in you and turn to you in prayer.