Thursday, April 24, 2014

The Burden of Tomorrow

Good Thursday morning! But...tomorrow is Friday, how can that be a burden? Ah, but not just any tomorrow do we worry and fret over. We like to live in the anxious tomorrow all the time. Jesus calls to us from now, today, right here and right now. The imagination takes off into tomorrow, ready to heap upon us the dread of an unlikely day. Like a credit card that charges unseemly interest by flogging the brain, we borrow short-term dread from an imaginary tomorrow. What a burden to carry into today! The peace given us by Jesus trampled under by the anxiety of a day never to come. Oh, that we would stay in the comforting arms of Jesus today!

Maybe a little melodramatic there, but the shoe does fit many of us like Cinderella's glass slipper. We think of all the dread remotely possible with an active imagination, add a few highly unlikely scenarios, and take off into feeling awful under a burden of anxiety. We don't feel the peace of Christ because we have tripped an avalanche of imaginary grief that fell down on top of it. The loving arms of Jesus feel distant because we are looking into a future that we cannot possibly know. Yet, those loving arms, though we don't feel them physically, are about us even as we look into the darkness.

Never leave us or forsake us, he said, and that is true even when we look in the wrong direction or at a wrong time. Be comforted in the present. Let the future worry about itself. Trust in Jesus today and walk with Him in this day. Stopping those dark thoughts is difficult. That is why tomorrow is such a burden. Let us walk together in Christ today.

The blessings of grace to you on this day,
Bucky

No comments: