We’ve all heard the old adage, “Life is what you make it!” Someone once said, “Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.”
How do you take life? Life’s up and downs? It’s lonely times? It’s months of quarantine and isolation?
Sometimes when I am at a mall, I’ll ride the escalator to get up and down the floors. Once in a while the escalator breaks down and they have to put the “Out of Order”sign in from of it.
A while back I encountered an escalator that was not running. It had an interesting sign in front of it: “This Escalator is Temporarily a Stairway.”
Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it. Is the escalator out of order or is it a stairway? I think this is especially what has been happening during the coronavirus pandemic.
In today’s Gospel (Matt 11:25-30), Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yolk upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; for you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
How often do we go to Jesus with our burdens, with our worries and with our pandemic confinement?
There’s an old Jamaican proverb that says: “If you’re going to pray, don’t worry….And if you’re going to worry, don’t pray.”
Corrie ten Boom, who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, has said, “Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength – carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, it empties today of its strength.”
Worry implies that we don’t quite trust that God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what’s happening in our lives.
When your heart starts to worry and your mind just can’t rest, put your thoughts into prayers and let God do the rest.
What worries and burdens with the pandemic is Jesus helping YOU to manage? Why do you say that?
