Distracted

Time Disappears When You Are Talking

Ed, my old neighbor from Saskatchewan, called yesterday when I wasn’t in the apartment. The wife said that I would probably be back after about an hour or two as I was gardening. My old neighbor did skype again later, but I was still out.

Some days you get delayed because others keep talking to you. At the community gardens, I had a long talk with a fellow gardener, about everything gardening. My beans took a long time to pick because I was busy talking. When I came home, I had been away so long that I ended up skyping Ed. He complained that only retired folks could waste time talking. 

My old neighbor was anxious to tell me about a bad storm that went through north of Melville not so far from his farm. He had watched the storm from the shelter of his Quonset. He was worried it would flatten his grain but later he learned the same storm had spawned a tornado that destroyed a home, not far enough for comfort from his farm. Ed was relieved he wasn’t in the path of the tornado.

From August until harvest, Ed gets anxious about everything. Are his crops ripening fast enough? What might his potential yield become? Will he have hail damage? His concerns grow like mosquitoes and are just as irritating. It is never easy to wait and see, and then deal with what happens in trust, that things will be okay no matter what. The most anxious and worrisome times have to do with those situations when we aren’t in control of circumstances that have to play out.

If retirees, like me, waste time talking, many folks find their time gets spent in anxiousness or worry. We all get distracted by our concerns and get focused on them and quit trusting God. We do not like to admit that we are not in control of our lives. As Christians, our security is in God, and he calls us to live in trust or faith in him, rather than being anxious. We may tend to put our confidence in what we can see and manage ourselves, rather than God. Yes, we do need to live and work and watch and manage our lives, but there is a limit to our efforts at seeing, doing and being. Life is not all up to us.

God calls us to have assurance in himself, though, we cannot perceive when and how his word will be fulfilled in our lives. God loves us, and he wants us to trust his love for us now, while we wait for the fulfillment of heaven to come.

Trusting God overcomes our anxiousness as shown in the Bible. Abraham believed and trusted the Lord, but he became worried by what he saw. Sarah, his wife, remained childless through the years. Abraham complained to God that if he died his heir would not be his son, and his property would go to the head of his household Eliezer of Damascus. The Lord assured Abraham that Eliezer would not be his heir, but that it would be his very own son. Abraham believed the Lord and trusted what the Lord promised him. A son, Isaac, was eventually born to Sarah according to God’s timetable.

Sharing is caring!

News Reporter

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *