Giving Away Your Cares

Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.

1 Peter 5:7

We women carry many things in our purses: cell phones or Blackberry devices; wallets with all manner of identification, credit cards, and stamps; breath mints, small hairbrushes, pens and notebooks. I wish I could say I travel light, but that’s not the case. My purse is full of things I use daily and other items I might need: a small address book, lipstick and concealer, photos of my grandkids, checkbook, pain relievers and allergy pills.

Students carry heavy backpacks. And just like our weighty purses and heavy backpacks, our hearts carry burdens and cares: concerns about our troubled teenagers, financial burdens, and a load of worry if we have a deployed loved one. We carry anxiety about the future or about the possibility of being downsized out of a job. But no matter what our burdens are, in today’s verse, God invites us to give all of them to him. The word cares in 1 Peter 5:7 means “all our worries, all our burdens, all our concerns.” That covers everything, including whatever wakes us up in the middle of the night and all the anxious “tapes” playing in our heads when we’re driving to work or carpooling kids.

Just as the Lord carried the burden of our sin on the cross, he wants to carry the people we are worried about, the emotional concerns, the relationship problems, the burdens of fear and shame that exhaust and discourage us. What a great invitation! What a matchless promise! He cares about us watchfully and affectionately. We can release all that concerns us to the One for whom nothing is impossible and who can handle this and every problem when we release them to him.

—CHERI

Lover of my soul, you are so gracious to carry my burdens, to invite me to cast my heaviest cares on you. Thank you for loving me and caring for me so affectionately.

Through faith you have become a child of God, you have been saved, and through faith you also achieve victory over worry, fear, and other sins. Cast your burdens on the Lord. You do that when you pray.

—CORRIE TEN BOOM (1892–1983), HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR, AUTHOR

From the book