Jaci Velasquez - TrustSample

I Will Call

C. S. Lewis observed that "seeds grow in dark places." Sometimes the hardest passages of life can be the ones in which we do the most growing. Put another way, the times when we make the greatest strides towards the future God has planned for us are often the times when we can be preoccupied with our own worries.

Jesus gets to the heart of the matter here. The sort of worries He seems to be talking about are the ones about the future – even the immediate future. How many times have we sat through a church service worrying about the state of our bank balance or the next crisis facing us on Monday morning? Times like that we find it hard to concentrate on meeting with God and worry gets in the way.

But is Jesus telling us never to bother shopping, cooking, or cleaning? Should we expect that the things that we honestly believe we desperately need will magically appear out of thin air? Of course not.

Jesus is encouraging us to live in the moment, to think about the problems we need to solve when we've got time to solve them. He wants us to enjoy the conversation with a friend rather than worrying about getting to the next appointment. And He’s encouraging us to call on Him. Always.

So, our aim is to try and keep concerned with what we are doing now, not with what might happen in the future. This probably means breaking a lot of habits and we are going to need God's help. Perhaps we need to think about why we have certain thought patterns – why we get worried about getting overwhelmed by work, why we worry about friendships going stale – as sometimes the roots are found back in something that happened to us a while ago.

Whatever it is, gaining a godly fear and losing an ungodly fear is going to take time, and, especially, lots of time spent with God.

But it will be worth it. Learning how to call for help, how to trust God in our weakness, how to stop thrashing in the waters and let ourselves be rescued – these are some of the most important lessons we can ever hope to learn.