It was one of those blurr days. I was charged with going to buy the range we had selected. Once I got through the paperwork, the salesman said that they needed a four-pronged outlet to plug into. The only way to check what was behind the old range was to come home and move it. I tipped it precariously forward onto a mattress I had dragged into the kitchen, and could see it was hooked up through a junction box. Knowing this would need to be rewired into an outlet, I called an electrician friend who said, “Hey that’s easy.” After he ran through what I would need to do, losing me after the first step, I said, “I’ll call back and tell you how it is going.” He ended up coming to help. This meant taking the old range out. So, I did this, he came and helped, and we put in the new outlet. All finished a few hours later! I felt like I had really accomplished something, and the new range would be coming on the next Thursday, five days later.
I had sent pictures of my journey but I forget to mention that one detail, that we would be without the range for five days. Karen had been impressed, only seeing pictures and reading texts that they would be able to deliver it on the same day as purchased, a Saturday. She got home and there was this hole where the range had been. As we talked over what we might do for dinner, suddenly the stress of this situation came forward, and she said, in one of those sudden revelations: “But how am I going to cook my egg in the morning?”
At that I understood. In life often it is the little things that are the toughest, the smallest of details that “break the camel’s back.”
“Oh, Karen. Didn’t I tell you that they were not delivering the new range today?” I asked, apologetic.
Anxiety can hit in the smallest details of life and often as Jesus wrote it will be centered around the basics of our bodies (shape, size, etc), then, food, drink and clothing.
This week Jesus deals with three core problems that we face as people in our lives and these interrelate. Jesus speaks of these as anxiety, judgment and not realizing how deeply we are loved. These can interrelate, for when we are anxious, that very anxiety can cause us to be hyper aware of the faults of others, bringing us into judgment, and both are related to a basic belief that we are not loved. To all this the heart remedy is to turn outward, to seek God, to find refuge in that relationship, to pay attention to our own needs and brokenness rather than being hyper attentive to others.
That may be clear, but we need reminders to come back to God’s for us. For all of us can find ourselves mired into feelings of anxiety or judgment or being forlorn. And for all this, God invites us back to Himself. Let’s come there this week.