Open Hands · Week 2 · Saturday · ANXIETY

This past Sunday, I told you I am a planner by temperament, and that Ecclesiastes 3 has always been a problem for me. I have been in seasons where the thing I most want to move is the thing I have the least ability to move.

I run two businesses. Some seasons the work is there. Some seasons you are waiting on it, and the waiting is not passive — there are calls to make and conversations to have — but underneath all of that is a stretch of time where the outcome is simply not in your hands, and no amount of competence shortens it.

I am not good at that stretch. When I cannot make the thing happen, I go make something else happen, so that at least something is happening. I have called that diligence for most of my adult life. Some of the time that is exactly what it is. Some of the time it is a man who cannot sit still, getting lost in the transaction because the transaction is the only part he can control.

Grocery Questions

Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’Matthew 6:31 (BSB)

I want to point at what those questions actually are, because we spiritualize them and they are not spiritual. They are grocery questions. Housing questions. Provision questions. They are the exact questions a man with a household runs at two in the morning when he is doing arithmetic about thirty and sixty and ninety days out.

Jesus put the household’s provision in the mouth of worry on purpose. He knew that is where it lives for most people. Not in abstractions — in what is on the table.

For the Gentiles strive after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.Matthew 6:32 (BSB)

Knows. Present tense, already. Not will find out when I explain it to Him. Not is waiting for me to demonstrate the need. He already knows, and the striving adds nothing to His information.

What It Cost

None of this shows at my dinner table, and that is on purpose.

My wife and my sons are on the receiving end of everything I provide — the house, the food, the experiences I want them to have. The pressure of that is mine to carry and I do not want them carrying any part of it. So they get the version of me that is fine. That is a decision I would make again and again.

But, that has a cost to most of us that operate that way. The cost is that the anxiety stays entirely yours. There is no one in the room to interrupt the loop, because we make sure there is no one in the room, on purpose.

I always said I trusted Him with it. I did not know what the word meant until there was nothing left to optimize.

The part that is least flattering in that way of operating is the part worth saying to those who are similar in disposition.

I trust God more readily with my family’s health than with the next thirty days of projects. I hand Him, without much struggle, the things I was never going to control. It is the ones where my own competence almost reaches — where a better plan might have worked, where another call might have landed — that I keep holding.

Still Learning

This post does not end with a resolution, because I do not have one. The seasons come and go, some linger. I still do arithmetic some nights, and I still catch myself going to make something happen so that something is happening.

My changes are still small. I have started noticing the move as I make it — that particular restlessness that sends me looking for a task — and sometimes, not always, I stop and pray instead of executing on something.

That is the whole report. Not peace. Noticing.

Paul said he learned contentment, and this week I have finally taken that word seriously. Learned means there was a period where even Paul was bad at it. Did he ever stop learning and growing?

Open Hands · Week 2 Complete · The series continues