Copyright 2015 by Shea Oakley
\nAll rights reserved<\/p>\n
God, I\u2019ve found, is not in the habit of giving me exactly what I want in life. I think all Christians have had the same experience. We know that what we want and what He gives us often does not appear to be in synch. A perhaps lesser recognized truism about how our Lord deals with our desires is the opposite experience. He rarely gives us the thing we want least. By this I mean that what we most dread happening to us usually does not happen.<\/p>\n
While it is true that God sometimes asks us to do things we desperately do not want to do this is not what I\u2019m speaking of. Rather, I\u2019m referring to what might be called \u201cthe worst case scenario;\u201d many of us live our\u00a0lives haunted by it. We have a tendency, in the language of the counseling office, to \u201cawful-lize:\u201d to assume the worst in any given challenging circumstance.<\/p>\n
A recent two-part poll discovered an interesting truth about anxiety and reality. People in the test group were asked to name the things they worried about the most. They were then re-polled months later to find out how many of these anxiety-producing fears actually came to pass. The figure turned out to be 8%. This is a testimony to God\u2019s grace being operative even among non-believers, at least in the sense of temporal concerns. Things just do not tend to turn out as badly as they, or we, think\u202692% of the time.<\/p>\n
This is perhaps part of why Jesus told us not to be anxious. He knew that the fallen human tendency to worry is often not justified by actual experience. His grace, even His common grace, is operative in the lives of all men and that alone means that we are wasting time and energy by worrying. Anxiety is one of the most effective robbers of our joy and far too many people (myself among them) are caught up in it with no justification to be found in actual experience.<\/p>\n
This being the case it might be salutary to pray that God would open our eyes to the reality of the 92%. By his Spirit we have the ability to apply this new \u201chead knowledge\u201d to our hearts, even though our head and our hearts are separated by possibly the longest 18 inches in human experience. May our Lord bridge that gap as we trust in Him to help us banish unnecessary fear from our lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copyright 2015 by Shea Oakley All rights reserved God, I\u2019ve found, is not in the habit of giving me exactly what I want in life. I think all Christians have had the same experience. We know that what we want and what He gives us often does not appear to be in synch. A perhaps… <\/p>\n