Practical Actions

Practical Actions

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

1 Peter 5:7

Have you ever been weighed down by worry? Me, too. And if worry has us in its grip, we feel tired, unproductive, and ineffective. Our best option is to invite the Lord into the worry. When 1 Peter 5:7 says, “Give all your worries and cares to God,” it offers a solution that works. But how do we give worry to him?

First, we need to understand he’s inviting us to talk to him. When we show up for the ninety-seventh time with the same concern, he does not say, “Well, it’s you, again?” He says, “Welcome. I’m glad you are talking to me about this.” As we keep talking to him, we find calmness and, often, creative solutions.

Sometimes it helps to picture putting our concerns in an imaginary box. One woman pretended to place her worry in a big gift box. In her mind, she wrapped the box, put a big bow on it, and placed it on the closet shelf. Every time she’d find herself worrying about that particular problem, she’d force herself to go through the mental exercise of taking the box off the shelf, undoing the bow, unwrapping the box, and pulling out the worry. It was such a mental ordeal she finally decided the problem wasn’t worth the effort of worrying about it.

If you don’t like mental exercises, you can make a tangible God Bag. One of my friends writes “God Bag” on the outside of a brown lunch sack. Then every time she worries, she writes the concern on a scrap of paper and drops it into the bag. Once a month, she sorts through the paper slips and sees how God has solved many of them. Any still of concern to her are tossed back into the bag. She’s found that as she places each worry in the God Bag, she’s reminding the Lord and herself that she trusts him to answer in his time and in his way. What a difference her decision has made. “I can’t control all the crises in life,” she says. “But I can trust God to guide me through them.” And isn’t that wonderful peace during worrisome times? —SANDRA

Lord, giving you my worries is going to be a challenge since I’m prone to fret about the what-ifs and if-onlys. But I’m excited to try your way because my way hasn’t worked. So right now I imagine putting my trembling hand into your strong one. Guide me in releasing my worries and cares to you.

It is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life.

—ELISABETH ELLIOT, MISSIONARY, AUTHOR, AND SPEAKER