Life Lessons for Anxious Kids | Tree Street Kids DevotionalSample

Feeling anxious about--everything 

The week wasn’t even over yet and Jack had already moved to a new house in a new town. Bad.

But he’d helped his next door neighbor. Good. Then he got caught in a storm. Bad. But he’d made a friend. Good. On top of everything, it was tornado season in the Midwest again. Bad. At least a tornado hadn’t touched down last night. Very good. In fact, lots of good things had come out of things that were--okay, not really bad, but still scary and hard.

Now it was Saturday morning. Jack was in the yard cleaning the storm blown leaves and twigs out of the spokes of his bike wheels. The sun warmed the top of his head, and birds bathed in a nearby puddle. So why did he still feel as if he was standing right in the middle of a little twister? 

“Are you getting ready to take me to the park?” Midge rode up on her bike, hit the brakes too hard, and toppled over onto the grass beside him.

Speaking of little twisters, Jack mumbled.

She sat up and brushed the grass off her knees. “Why do you look the way you always do after you eat a whole bag of flaming hot cheese doodles?”

Jack pulled the last leafy twig out of his back wheel. One of the spokes was bent. Argh. “I don’t know,” he said, sitting back in the grass. “It’s just . . . everything.”

“Wow, everything is a lot of stuff,” Midge said.

The crunch of tires on gravel interrupted them.

“Grandma and Grandpa!” they shouted together, jumping up as the old truck crept up the driveway.

After Grandma and Midge headed off to the park, Grandpa knelt beside Jack to check out the bent spoke.

“It’s just one more bad thing this week,” Jack said.

Grandpa put an arm around him and squeezed. “You know the amazing thing about a bent spoke?” he asked. “You have thirty-one other good spokes that are connected to this.” He pointed at the hub of the wheel. “Hmmm.”

Grandpa’s “hmmms” almost always signaled a lesson.

Jack smiled. “I get it. There were more good things than bad this week. Plus, I guess ‘hard’ doesn’t mean ‘bad.’ Especially if I trust Jesus.”

God loves you more than anything. He knows about the “everythings” in your life--the good and bad things; the joyful and hard times. When you keep God at the center of your life, He’ll strengthen you and provide what you need.

Words to hold on to when you feel anxious about everything: “Look at the birds of the air . . . your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”