What To Do With Our Hands--September 7, 2023

What To Do With Our Hands--September 7, 2023

"For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to find out about your faith; I was afraid that somehow the tempter had tempted you and that our labor had been in vain." [1 Thessalonians 3:5]

I have a working theory about worry, and it goes like this: worry is the form that love takes when we don't know what to do next. In most cases, that means the reasons for our worry are not bad in and of themselves--they may be quite noble, in fact. You care about the people who are back roads during the thunderstorm during deer season, so you worry until they've made it home. You are concerned about family members working or traveling in other countries, because they are not there in the room with you for you to guarantee their safety. You don't want to see your friends approaching retirement lose their nest-egg, so you worry when the Dow Jones has a string of bad days. It is all very well-intentioned, and kind of sweet, I suppose. But let's be honest, too, this kind of worry is just a bit futile. Worry is perhaps the spiritual and mental equivalent of nervous pacing--you wish you could do something rather than nothing to help a situation, but either you are physically unable to do it or can't think of what to do. That's just the nature of the beast here.

If I seem to be a little soft here on worry and worriers, I will own the fact that I am wired to be a worrier myself. Perhaps I'm just trying to rationalize the irrational, but I really do think that worry can be a sign that you are alive--indeed, that you are aware of the troubles in the world and concerned about how they will affect the people care about. And with that confession out there, I have to tell you that it is of some comfort to me to know that Paul found himself worrying sometimes. And at least here in 1 Thessalonians 3:5, the worry seems to fit my working theory--Paul loves this congregation he had spent a great deal of time and energy in, and even from a distance he cared about how they were doing. But he realized that there was nothing he could do on his own to keep them from every danger. But at some point, he stopped stewing and sent his co-worker in the gospel, Timothy, to check in with good old First Church of Thessalonica. And Paul shares with us that he really was stewing over this. His theology told him that he could trust a good and strong Savior to preserve these Christians in the faith despite the insidious temptations of the devil. But we humans are more than strictly brains, and Paul's emotions and affections started whispering these doubts to him. And so concern became anxiety, and anxiety became worry, and before very long, Paul was pacing the floors wondering about his friends far away. The really bright insight that Paul offers us here is that at some point, he realized that just stewing about the worry wasn't doing anybody any good. And so, even if it turned out (as it did in the end) that he was all worked up and worried about nothing, Paul needed to send Timothy so that Paul could unclench his nervous spirit and get back to his own work. That's really the double-edged sword when we let worry get out of control--not only are you spending a lot of energy getting worked up about something that isn't helping the ones you're worrying about, you're also keeping yourself from using any of that energy for something productive. Up to the moment that Paul decided to send Timothy to reconnect with their friends in Thessalonica, he was earning ten out of ten for loving concern, but he was failing in terms of efficiency, of usefulness--his loving concern was just spinning its wheels and grinding its gears.

We Christians are going to have to learn to live with a certain amount of worry, and a certain amount of inefficiency in this life. We cannot help but care about others--our friends, our families, our fellow congregation members, and the needs of our community, country, and world. We are made for connection and love just being human, and on top of that, then as followers of Jesus we are called into a life of love of neighbor that means we will care about the needs of those around us. But at the same time, we are not given unlimited power or knowledge. So there will be times when we are concerned about people we cannot see, or times when we do not know what to do to help them. We are going to have to get used to a certain amount of worry in this life. And yet we are not called to wallow in it, or to celebrate worry for its own sake. Worry is a side effect, or a byproduct, that is going to be produced occasionally when people love but do not have the power to know or fix all things. But it is largely a waste of a byproduct. Like the sludgy mess than comes out of a mine, it's not good for much of anything of its own, except to tell you that the mine is operating. The coal is what will burn--the sludge is something that can't be avoided if you're going to mine the coal that you're after--it is a sign that our process is rather inefficient, but is at least doing something. (We can have the discussion about the value and perils of coal mining on another day--right now, the metaphor about worry will suffice, I hope.)

So at some point, we have to decide how much of our energy we want to pour into creating more worry, and at what point we want to redirect our energy into something more useful and valuable. If we take Paul seriously and learn from his experience, we can come to that point sooner rather than later. We can decide that anxious pacing in an empty room doesn't do much good for anybody, and we can figure out how best to channel the love we already have into efforts that will either help those we worry about or allow us to let go of the worry enough to get back to whatever it is we really are called to be about. In our day, we are blessed with much quicker ways of releasing that worry than Paul had at his disposal. While Paul was easily looking at weeks between sending Timothy and hearing back from him, we can make a phone or send an email and have near instant response that lets us either be a help or let go of our worry. The question, then, today, is whether we will follow Paul's example and allow our worry to be rechanneled so that love can do something good in the day we have been given.

O Lord God, you must laugh and hurt for us at the same time, knowing how much of ourselves we waste letting well-intentioned love be clenched up in worry. Give us relief, Lord, and use the love you have placed in us in constructive ways.