Open Hands · Week 2 · Tuesday · ANXIETY
He is thirteen and he is awake again.
Nothing in the room frightens him. He is not thinking about anything that has happened. He is running tomorrow — the walk in, where to sit, what happens if the teacher calls on him, what he says if she does, what he says if the answer comes out wrong, who hears it. He runs the sequence to the end, does not like the ending, and runs it again to see whether it comes out better the second time.
It does not come out better. The clock keeps moving.
What he is doing, without any vocabulary for it, is tomorrow’s work. And he has no grace for tomorrow yet, because tomorrow has not arrived.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Today has enough trouble of its own.Matthew 6:34 (BSB)
A Statement About Supply
That is one of the most quoted sentences Jesus ever said and one of the least believed, and I think it is because we hear it as reassurance. It is not reassurance. Read it again: it does not say tomorrow will be fine.
It says tomorrow has its own trouble, and its own day to arrive in.
And then the second half, which is the part I would put on a wall in a thirteen-year-old’s room: today has enough trouble of its own. Enough. Today came fully loaded and also fully supplied. Whatever you have been given for today is sized for today.
Which means the thing he was doing at midnight was not a moral failure. It was an accounting error. He was spending today’s supply on a day that had not opened yet.
He had no grace for tomorrow because tomorrow had not arrived. Grace is not prepaid.
What It Cost
The turn was four words long, and I want to be honest about how hard four words can be.
He told a parent he cannot sleep.
At thirteen that is not a small sentence. It feels like handing someone documentary proof that you are not handling it — that everyone else walks in and sits down and answers the question, and you are the one lying awake rehearsing it. He had gone weeks specifically to avoid saying it.
His parent did not fix anything, because there was nothing to fix. Tomorrow was still tomorrow. The teacher might still call on him. The answer might still come out wrong.
Something does change, though, when the rehearsal stops being a private loop and becomes a sentence in a room with somebody else in it. A loop running inside one head has nothing to interrupt it. It can run all night. It very often does.
He slept that night. Not because anything about tomorrow got better. Because he finally stopped trying to live in it before it came.
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