I recently realized that I have a superstitious bent to my nature. I don’t throw salt over my shoulder or knock on wood, but I do hold tight to my fears about the future and obsessively go over them as a worry stone in my pocket.
I run them over and over in my thoughts as if letting them go will make them less likely to come true. Like a snake in the corner, I can’t take my eyes off them or they will get me!
I call it superstitious because the old religions of this world interacted with the gods of their world as beings within the same system they were in and could be managed and controlled by careful diligence to rituals and sacrifices.
My worrying is like a ritual.
I must perform this ritual to keep the dreaded fear from coming into reality.
But this isn’t consistent with God’s revelation of Himself and how He works. By teaching us that He is the Creator of all things, even of the universe itself (the ancient gods always came out of the eternal universe), that there was nothing before He called it into existence, He declares Himself untouchable and unchangeable by anything in the creation.
This is what Jesus means when He teaches us to pray, “Our Father which art in heaven” in The Lord’s Prayer. Only a God immovable by forces within the world can be relied on to answer the prayer Jesus teaches us.
My worries often keep me up in the night.
They steal the promised rest a busy day should give me.
Where can help come for this burden I am not sufficient to? David, the man after God’s own heart, knew more about distress and burdens than a little mom in rural Wyoming, and He declared:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: He that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
(Psalm 121:1-4, KJV)
I can lay my head down in peace and sleep because the God of the universe loves me and cares for me.
The One who keeps me neither slumbers nor sleeps.
“I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.”
