How Thinking is Bad
I don’t worry. But I do something worse… I think.
I know it may not seem like it, but for me it is. If you think about what worry is, it I essentially a lack of trust in God. Often worry can be described as looking at a situation and saying, “I can’t do anything to control this.” and combining that with a lack of reliance on God’s sovereignty. With that in place, you begin to pointlessly replay all the negative scenarios in your head.
We would all admit that worrying is bad, but thinking…?
Here’s what I’m getting at. I am a type A personality. The type of worrying I mentioned above is often done by those described as type B, those who are not as aggressive in their approach to life. Type A’s don’t tend to worry like that; we’re too proactive, too intentional. What we do instead is problem solve. When a difficult problem arises, we sit and think. We think about possible solutions, possible contingencies, about people or organizations we can talk with to find solutions, about ways of reorienting ourselves to find solutions.
The negative thing about this approach is it also shows a lack of trust in God. This lack of reliance on God’s sovereignty is combined with saying, “I have to find some way to fix this problem.”
I am reminded of Proverbs 9:10
Fear of the LORD is the foundation of wisdom. Knowledge of the Holy One results in good judgment. (NLT)
“Knowledge of the Holy One” – knowing that God cares about us and that he will sovereignly work out his plan in our lives – is the key to life’s problems. Taking those problems on myself, either in the form of worry or in the form of problem solving, only makes me feel responsible for something I have little control over anyway.