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Lesson Eight: Anxiety -Anxious for Nothing- At first glance, Paul’s admonition to “Be anxious for nothing” appears utterly unhelpful. It reminds me of the bad old days back when I was still single and dateless, and well-meaning friends would tell me, “Just relax and be yourself, and eve-rything will be fine.” In other words, the path to success was not caring about something I cared very much about. How helpful!It’s easy to read the Biblical warn-ing against anxiety in the same light. For many of us, anxiety is as omnipresent as the air we breathe. We’re worried about our jobs, we’re worried about our finances, we’re worried about our families, and Jesus and His disciples come trotting into our lives and tell us to quit. Once again, how helpful!However, we would do well to heed the divine injunction. Even in prac-tical terms, anxiety isn’t useful. It drains us of the energy that we might use to solve our soluble prob-lems, and if the problem is insolu-ble, why fret over the inevitable?In spiritual terms, anxiety is even worse. It is a symptom of foolish reliance on the self. In reality, there is nothing that any of us can do of ourselves to make our work suc-cessful or our finances stable or our families happy. All of those bless-ings are in the hand of God, to give or withhold as He chooses. They do not lie within our power. The only thing we can control is our relation-ship with Him. All we can do is seek His kingdom first and trust Him to provide for us all the other things that we need. Anxiety accomplish-es nothing. ©Copyright Matthew W. Bassford, 2013. This material is subject to a Crea-tive Commons attribution-noncommercial-no derivative works license. This means that it may be reproduced, shared, and used freely, provided it is attributed to the author, not used for commercial purposes, and not altered in any way. For more information, please see creativecommons.org