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Music For the Soul
Devotional: October 21st

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"BE CAREFUL FOR NOTHING"

Be not therefore anxious for the morrow, for the morrow will be anxious for itself - Matthew 6:34

An apparently impossible advice. That word "careful," in a great many places in the New Testament, does not mean what it has come to mean to-day; but it means what it should still mean, " lull of care." And "care" meant, not prudent provision, forethought, the occupation of a man’s common sense with his duty and his work and his circumstances, but it meant the thing which of all others unfits a man most for such prudent provision, and that is, the nervous irritation of a gnawing anxiety which, as the word in the original means, tears the heart apart and makes a man quite incapable of doing the wise thing, or seeing the wise thing to do, in the circumstances. "Careful" here means neither more nor less than " anxious."

But even with that explanation, is it not like an unreachable ideal that Paul puts forward? "Be anxious about nothing." How can a man who has to face the possibilities that we all have to face, and who knows himself to be as weak to deal with them as we all are - how can he help being anxious? There is no more complete waste of breath than those sage and reverend advices which people give us, not to do the things nor to feel the emotions which our position make absolutely inevitable and almost involuntary. Here, for instance, is a man surrounded by all manner of calamity and misfortune; and some well-meaning, but foolish, friend comes to him, and, without giving him a single reason for the advice, says, " Cheer up, my friend! " Why should he cheer up? What is there in his circumstances to induce him to fall into any other mood? Or some unquestionable peril is staring him full in the face, coming nearer and nearer to him, and some well-meaning, loose-tongued friend, says to him, " Do not be afraid! " But he ought to be afraid. That is about all that worldly wisdom and morality have to say to us when we are in trouble and anxiety. " Shut your eyes very hard, and make believe very much, and you will not fear." An impossible exhortation! Just as well bid a ship in the Bay of Biscay not to rise and fall upon the wave, but to keep an even keel - just as well tell the willows in the river-bed that they are not to bend when the wind blows - as come to me, and say to me, " Be careful about nothing," unless you have a great deal more than that to say. I must be, and I ought to be, anxious about a great many things. Instead of anxiety being folly, it will be wisdom; and the folly will consist in not opening our eyes to facts, and in not feeling emotions that are appropriate to the facts which force themselves against our eyeballs. Threadbare maxims, stale, musty old commonplaces of unavailing consolation and impotent encouragement say to us, " Do not be anxious." We try to stiffen our nerves and muscles in order to bear the blow; or some of us, more basely still, get into a habit of feather-headed levity, making no forecasts, nor seeing even what is plainest before our eyes. But all that is of no use when once the hot pincers of real trouble, impending or arrived, lay hold of our hearts. Then, of all idle expenditures of breath in the world, there is none to the wrung heart more idle and more painful than the one that says. Be anxious about nothing.

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