“Tell your neighbor. “Don’t worry about it.'”

And in the typical call in response tradition of the African American culture, the church repied, “Don’t worry about it.”

Oh how I needed to hear those words. Last week, my lender took out a lump sum of money out of my account. I was on an income based repayment plan, however, I had missed the deadline to renew it. Sure enough, Fedloan did not miss my bank account. They took out $700 more than my usual monthly payment. I was devastated. At that very moment, I fell into a day long depression.

I looked at my loan balance, I compared it to my merely teaching salary and thought.

There is no way I will pay my loans off by age 32. I’ll be 28 in a few months.

I began to worry.

I need a new job.

Summer is about to come and my income will drop drastically.

I wish I could save even more.

I wish I had a job in which I could actually afford that loan payment.

I just want a job that I enjoy and pays well.

I don’t know where to look. I don’t know how to start.

These are the thoughts or better yet worries that ran through my mind. So when I attended my coworker’s church on Sunday, I was surprise to hear the pastor say,

“Don’t worry about it.”

She focused her sermon on Matthew 6:25-34 in which Jesus commands his followers not to worry because just as God gots my back. God feeds the birds and dresses the flowers. Of course he will handle my situation.

But how can I not worry? Worrying is easy to the point that it is natural. It makes sense to worry. However, worrying doesn’t do anything. In fact, in verse 27, Jesus questions; “ Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” In other words, worrying does nothing but make you sick. Corrie ten Boom, a Christian women who helped Jews escape the Nazis, once wrote “Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its troubles. It empties today of it’s strength.”

Worrying is a waste of time. It is simply thinking of all the bad that may happen to you and focusing on the negative rather than solving the problem. Instead of worrying, the pastor urged us to do three things; have faith in God’s will, be faithful to God and to focus on your target.

Instead of worrying about my loans, I need to do the following:

1. Have faith that God will open doors of opportunity. Believe that he will never forsake me.
2. Stay faithful to God through prayer and thanksgiving.
3. Focus on finding work. Motivate myself to keep looking and to keep going.

Worrying is easy because it doesn’t take work. Not worrying is hard because you actually have to do something about your problem rather than simply dwelling on it.That’s a formidable task and it’s up to me to decide whether I’m up for the challenge of being worry free. But I am willing to try. That sermon was definitely a blessing to me and I hope this blog post is one to you.

If you are worrying about something, I just want to tell you.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Esther