Tomorrow’s Trivia! (02.24.06--Do Not Worry!--Luke 22:24)
An average person’s anxiety is focused on: 40% -- things that will never happen, 30% -- things about the past that can’t be changed, 12% -- things about criticism by others, mostly untrue, 10% -- about health, which gets worse with stress, 8% -- about real problems that will be faced.
So, if only about 8% of all the issues in our lives really turn out to be something, why is it that we spend so much time in worry and stress about all the rest? If we sat down and evaluated the following day everything that we were concerned about for that day on the day prior, it would, ultimately, result in an exercise of shame and embarrassment. Literally, we would look like fools because of our foolishness. What had appeared to us to be of great importance 24 hours earlier, for the most part, has resulted in the trivial, matters without consequence.
I love this story. J. Arthur Rank, an English executive, decided to do all his worrying on one day each week. He chose Wednesdays. When anything happened that gave him anxiety and annoyed his ulcer, he would write it down and put it in his “worry box” and forget about it until the next Wednesday. The interesting thing was that, on the following Wednesday when he opened his worry box, he found that most of the things that had disturbed him the past six days were already settled. It would have been useless to have worried about them in the first place. (Source Unknown.)
Sure, there are important things going on in life that we do need to pay attention to. It’s just that if we spend nearly all of our time worrying about the inconsequential, we won’t have time to focus on things of consequence. When we are so wrapped up in ourselves, so concerned for the little things that affect us everyday, we have the tendency to miss what IS really
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