I woke up today with a whopping head cold. These things happen.The best thing to do is pretend you don’t notice and make sure you have plenty of Kleenex.
I did pause to wonder, during a bout of Wagnerian sneezing, whether I might have the swine flu. Far better to be sick with a mere cold than the dreaded swine flu (or H1N1, as the pork producers prefer it be called). Swine flu is serious stuff. It can kill you.
But wait a minute. Did I know anybody who has gotten the swine flu? No, not personally. Not a single person.
Remember the dire warnings about the impending pandemic? Millions were going to die. Everybody was supposed to get a vaccine -- especially children, the elderly, and the sick! But there weren’t enough vaccines! Oh, the anxiety! Man the life boats! Women and children first!
We often are instructed to worry. Sometimes these warnings serve a purpose. For all I know, the swine flu apocalypse failed to materialize because enough people were vaccinated to nip it in the bud.
Still, we are encouraged to worry about a lot of things that we can’t do anything about, or that might not even exist.
Global warming. (Formerly, global cooling.) The economy. The health care crisis (which is a crisis for anybody who doesn’t have coverage, but not most people). Earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters. The world coming to an end in 2012, because that’s all the time the Mayans could fit on the rock they were carving.
We held our breathes as 1999 rolled over into 2000, having been warned of the horrific impact Y2K might wreak on mankind. The grid could go down! Hospitals without power! Jets falling out of the sky!
Jesus has some pretty straightforward advice on all of this: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? ... Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” And: "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me."
Those of us who are inclined to worry need to bear that in mind.
I certainly understand those words, but whenever I hear/read that passage or passages similar, I can't help but think, "well that is a lot easier to accept when your bills are paid and you have money in the bank. But when the rent over-due and you don't know where you next buck is coming from, well then it is a little tougher swallow". I guess that is why I need the discipline of being in the word on a daily basis. I am the weakest of the weak.
ReplyDeleteTrue enough. One of my personal crosses is a tendency to smugness. We've been very blessed, and it is, unfortunately, too easy for me to forget that some people are struggling to get by.
ReplyDeleteOne of my concerns in the above is that we have a culture that encourages us to worry (and think) about things that aren't real threats or are completely manufactured issues. Part of it is media, of which I am complicit, which needs dramatic concerns to engage people on slow news days; part of it (this will sound paranoid!) is people trying to manipulate the public for its own purposes.