Worrywart

I once had a colleague who had a poster on his cubicle that read: “Pray, hope, and don’t worry.” It was attributed to Padre Pio. When I first read that I thought to myself: That’s easy for him to say. He’s a saint. And he was supposed to be very mystical and could read deep into people’s souls.

I used to worry a lot. As a child, I would turn a situation I couldn’t solve over and over in my head and lose sleep over it. As I grew older, I learned to manage my worrying but I could never completely let go of it. As an adult, I realized that the stakes were higher and that prompted me to worry more. I would agonize over issues and situations I completely had no control over hoping that somehow overthinking it to death would solve it. I would intersperse my worrisome thoughts with prayers as though I were giving God suggestions about how to solve them.

But as I grew in my spiritual life, I realized that worrying was normal while that it was also a sign of a lack of trust in a God that I claimed to hear all my prayers. I realized that I had come to associate worrying about something with praying over it. But even when my prayers ended, my worrying didn’t.

About five or so years ago, I encountered a particularly difficult situation. But I’ll never forget, however, that the moment before everything happened, I was praying over a gospel story while I was at an Adoration Chapel. It was the story of Jesus walking on the water, trying to save his disciples from the storm. Peter asks Jesus to let him walk too and Peter does walk on water for a few steps. But then Peter notices the wind, and he begins to be afraid and starts to sink. Jesus has to pull him back up.

While praying on that narrative, I realized one tiny detail that I’d always missed. Peter began to sink not because the winds became heavier or the rains poured harder. The rains were as they had always been. In that version, Jesus doesn’t calm the storm, he just walks toward his disciples. In other words, what made Peter sink wasn’t his situation (because that hadn’t changed); it was because he looked at the storm instead of keeping his eyes fixed on Jesus.

As the weeks and months of that challenging year wore on, I kept telling myself that if I fixed my eye on Jesus instead of the constantly changing situations around me, he would see me through. And true enough, he did!

Keeping my eyes fixed on Jesus did not mean that I was spared from sadness or confusion or fear. But it did keep me grounded – enough to make me continue with my responsibilities at work, to seek the solace of loved ones, to recognize grace when it came, and most of all to trust that I wasn’t alone. And it saved me so much energy from useless worrying. It didn’t mean that I never worried at all but I do know I worried far less than if I had kept my focus on the storm around me.

I still worry these days. But I’d like to believe that I spend more time hoping and praying than I do worrying.