Patrick Butler: Another Look

Could people please stop worrying about things?

Life would be nicer if everyone would calm down and push the restart button. Take a deep breath and rest.

I know life is full of problems but worrying isn’t going to help. Most people know worrying can lead to a lot of missteps and wrong roads taken. The consequences makes things worse, not better.

So, please “don’t panic” as the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy puts it. Take another look: either God is there or not. If God is there, “no worries mate” as Ozzies say. If he’s not there we’re all in for it anyway.

But believers in God believe God is there.

I wonder if it’s because of general anxiety among said believers many young spiritual seekers try out trendy and untried spiritual paths looking for “peace.”

The status of many young people is they feel they don’t have a stake in things that have been done for decades.

Most are outsiders and they know it. They don’t walk, talk, act, dress or know the right people. They form their own “in-group” to avoid groups where gate-keepers communicate they didn’t measure up to social standards put before them. They react, understandably.

But what seems to really jigger the religious message are not “the television evangelists” or the latest blunder by some governing council of overseers.

Or some spiritual leader who fell into “moral failure” and regrets it on national television that millions of nonbelievers see and say “I told you so.”

It’s the personal anxieties of believers in homes or workplaces across the nation. That does more damage, I believe, than the others. Certainly anxiety and worry hurts where it counts most. At home.

References to “fretting” in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures describe the results of worry. It’s so mind-boggling you’d think everyone would avoid anxiety like cyanide punch.

It’s hard to defeat anxiety in life, even if the results are evident. Anxiety is like a drug addiction; once you start it, it’s hard to let it go. Many kids, who don’t get lots of credit for perception, can sense anxiety, feel it and are poisoned by people who say they’re trusting God. Young adults run from anxiety and the sad thing is so many run from where a profound, age-old answer to anxiety lies.

The post-modern age is a gift in disguise. Many young people in the 21st century aren’t buying the “ooze from the primordial slime” story of life modernists gave them.

Now is the time for believers to live like God exists in a meaningful way. One stand-out way to do that is to kill anxiety. Do that and they will come because it’s so hard to do, it becomes a “miracle” few understand.

Is worry a “sin” and killer, comparable to bitterness and “moral failure?” Perhaps it’s worse. I’ve listened to people’s perplexing and life-controlling problems for many years. So much stems from actions born out of anxiety.

Or hurt or fear, which is anxiety in two different forms. Pulling out the deep roots of anxiety sometimes reveals awful attitudes towards God, and is painful to see. But that’s the price of the truth that sets people free. Once it’s over, relief is the result.

What was it we were worried about again?

The battle for youth is slowly shifting from the mind to the heart. When the heart is anxious on the part of those who say God lives, it destroys the peace some young people are pursuing with well, all their heart.

Please make the daily effort to get rid of anxiety, as it says in Philippians 4:6, and be free from it. If not for yourself, for the sake of those who take another look to see if your path is really “the way” they ought to go.

Patrick Butler
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