February 6, 2012
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Were ye worrying?
I think perhaps the hardest of the Lord’s commands is the one to not worry. Other commands are certainly difficult, but there’s something about worrying that seems right, so why should we not do it? Doesn’t it mean we care about the right things?
In my case, no. I am the best (or the worst?) worrier of all time. Whichever one means I do it more than you. Living in my head is like sitting in a theatre where they only play horror trailers that relate to situations that are actually in your life. And these movies must be making money, otherwise they would have never come out with You’re Going to Fail This Class 87, or Your Car Probably Has a Ticket on It 176, or Everyone Probably Hates You 9,234.
Those things, however, are actually moderately realistic compared to a lot of things that I imagine happening. I remember last spring break we were trying to climb up this huge wall in Washington D.C. At the top of the wall was a hedge, and beyond the hedge was a person’s backyard. In a split moment I imagined one of us getting over the hedge only to find a huge Bengalian tiger, which causes us to jump back over the hedge, and that in turn leads the tiger to jump over the hedge to its death. The people who owned the tiger are then furious and sue and we have to pay them thousands of dollars.
That’s not even one worry. There’s a fear of dangerous wildlife and domestic court cases, all heaped into one scenario. And where did the tiger thought even come from?
That is only one example that I remember pretty clearly. I am constantly imagining buildings burning down, how that guy is going to mug me, the semi crashing into me, people deciding to never be friends with me again because I was late to something, and so on. And of course the worry that someone is going to drive away with my car while it is outside defrosting. A lot of my worries are the opposite, though: they are worries that it will look like I was committing some crime, and in my worry I end up imagining how I would explain it in court. I always snap out of those and think, ‘Did I really take that thought experiment all the way to me on the witness stand?’
It appears in my dreams all the time too. Last night I dreamt I was getting on a school bus, but I asked the driver to leave so that I could drive it instead. Then instead of general television I flipped on Mrs. Doubtfire for everyone’s personal televisions (it was like an airplane). Someone told on me so I had to explain myself to the principal and I kept on explaining how I was just like Mrs. Doubtfire, doing something rather unorthodox, but it was actually good for the kids when you thought about it.
When I think about the way I tend to worry, the command makes a lot more sense. A worry is something that necessarily looks away from rather than at the thing that you value. If you worry you are thinking of loss, rather than the thing you gained. Like the other day at school when I imagined falling down a long flight of concrete steps. I think God wants us to be careful, but more than that (that’s just smarts), I think he wants us to know what life really is, how awesome it is, how beautiful it is, how it is his overwhelming gift to us. Because most of the time none of us really get it, and that’s because we’re too busy worrying.
