When you wake up, first thing, what goes through your head? Chances are you reach for a familiar net of worries and anxieties. Or maybe you try to head straight back into sleep, which can be another way of dealing with the same problem. Either way, it’s a pretty deadly habit to create, especially when Jesus outright asks us: “Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Matthew 6:27 ESV). Worry doesn’t help us with anything, except maybe keeping our to-do list at the front of our minds – which could be done just as easily with a pen and a notebook. And the notebook doesn’t come with waves of anxiety that cut through our mind and set our emotions spiralling. Sometimes you hear people saying ‘If I don’t have something to worry about, I get worried about not having something to worry about.’ We might end up training ourselves to worry, to the degree that when it has nothing to work with, it just creates its own destructive feedback loops. Flying in the face of all this, the Bible tells us: ‘Don’t worry about anything, but pray about everything.’ The beauty of this is that it deals with the subjects that we dread to leave unattended; but instead of attending to them with unbounded, oppressive worry, we pick them up and hand them over to someone far more skilled in the art of getting stuff sorted. Jesus is our peace (take a look at Ephesians 2:14). So let’s let Him handle our worry.

What Now?

Sort your 6am priorities. Determine today what will be the first thing that enters your head tomorrow morning: will it be fear or will it be prayer?