sat virtually all day by her back window with a glass of water to throw at her neighbour’s cat if it set foot in her garden – a source of constant bickering between them. And I kept thinking, ‘Why don’t you just let go of this stuff? Just let go of it! You don’t have to be religious about it. You don’t have to worry that you haven’t had the last word, or got what you deserved. You don’t even have to tell anyone what you’ve done. Just let go! Make up your mind that these grievances are not going to have any power over you from now on. And feel the life-giving freedom of being a peacemaker.’
| God of peace, release me from the need to have the last word, the best deal, the winning argument. Instead give me back the freedom of friendship. And then let me call you father. Amen. |
Blessed are the peacemakers. Or in the nearest English equivalent to Jesus’ original saying: ‘Congratulations to you peacemakers!’
Congratulations to you who summon the patience to stop snapping at someone and start listening to them instead. Congratulations to you who talk long into the night with people who feel lost, and lead them gently to the peace of forgiveness. Congratulations to you who succeed in letting go of a grievance and restoring a relationship. Does it mean you have released someone from a burden? No! It’s the other way round. By forgiving someone you release the hold they have on you – that is why Jesus said you will be blessed if you succeed in making peace.
And your reward? God knows you as his son or his daughter. Why is that? Because when he sees what you have done, he recognizes a faint, flickering image of his own dear child, Jesus.
So give it a try! Let go! Just let go of the things that have disrupted the peace between you and someone else, and see what happens. You’ve got nothing to lose. After all, if it doesn’t work, there’s nothing to stop you going back to the hate and tension again. You won’t be any worse off! But maybe … who knows?
There’s no guarantee it will be easy to be called a child of God. If you doubt that, just remember what happened to the original Child of God in the years that followed him talking about making peace during a sermon he gave on a hill overlooking Lake Galilee.
But give it a go! Blessed are the peacemakers. Children of God. Just let go of stuff. Be glad! Congratulations!
| Be happy! Bring to mind the people or organizations who have slighted you, or hurt your feelings. People or businesses who owe you something, material or intangible, or with whom you need to get even. Think about the ways in which these things have held you back. Weigh up for a while whether it would be possible for you to write off these debts as if they had never happened. Make up your mind to try living as if they have no power over you at all, perhaps just for a trial period. There is no need to tell anyone that you have forgiven them. But monitor whether you have more peace of mind now that you have let go of the weight you were dragging around. |
Be Happy! Day 3
Master your worries
| What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labour under the sun? All their days their work is pain and grief; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless. People can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their work. Ecclesiastes 2.22–24 |
Why Jesus? Because he was utterly practical about how to live a worthwhile life. He calmed anxiety. His advice worked.
He spoke to the widow – lonely and debilitated out of fear for the future. He spoke to the man sinking under debt – worrying where the strength would come from to get a foothold. He spoke to those who were so anxious about material things that there was no room to grow in peace, joy and love – those who had reached that terrible state because they were so poor, and those who were in the same trap because they were so rich.
So when Jesus says, ‘Don’t worry!’ you know he isn’t just patting people on the head and saying, ‘There, there!’ Rather, he is intent on improving people’s lives. And I’m the kind of person who needs to be persuaded that there is a reason not to be anxious. I’m a born worrier.
After I left school, aged eighteen, I worked in a warehouse while I was waiting for my exam results to come out. I worried endlessly about whether I’d studied hard enough to get into college. I remember the forklift truck driver saying to me: ‘What’s the point of getting anxious about college? You can’t quote Shakespeare when you’re dead. My religion is: There’s no worry on earth that can’t be put right by a cold lager and a hot woman.’
Well, I’ve had several cold lagers since then!
I think about what he said from time to time, because more or less his exact words appear in the Bible. The man who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes was every bit as cynical as the driver. Jesus must have known these words: ‘What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labour under the sun? People can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their work.’
It seems impossible that these sarcastic words are in the Bible! But of course, just because they are in the Bible, it doesn’t mean the Bible approves of them. Ecclesiastes is one of the parts of the Bible that tells you, ‘This is how people in your world will think, but it’s not how the people of God are to think.’ Rise above this! Rise above it. Find a better way.
And of course, Jesus did find a better way. This was his contrasting advice: ‘Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.’ It is as if Jesus deliberately set out to give the writer of Ecclesiastes a slap in the face: ‘How dare you be so cynical!’ And I’ll bet he would say the same to the warehouse guy as well.
| [Jesus said,] ‘Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest? Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. Luke 12.25–31 |
| Pardon me and pray for me. Pray for me, I say. For I am sometimes so fearful, that I would creep into a mouse-hole. Sometimes God doth visit me again with his comfort. So he cometh and goeth. Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, in a letter from prison to his friend Bishop Nicholas Ridley, shortly before he was put to death for his faith, 1485–1555 |
Anxiety is going to be a fact of life, but there are two ways of responding to it. One of them is: ‘Blot it out with whatever you can find – in a bottle, in a fridge, in a shopping mall, or by working so hard that you never have to deal with it.’ That’s the cynic’s way.
Alternatively, there is the way of Jesus, who says, ‘My method won’t blot out worry. Or magic it away. But I can give you a secure way of dealing with it. Do you want to know more?’
| I worry until midnight, and from then on I let God worry. Luigi Guanella, founder of an Italian monastic order, 1842–1915 |
Of course we want to know more! Jesus gives us three straightforward reasons why we shouldn’t worry. The first one that it’s pointless. Jesus, though, said it rather more poetically: ‘Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?’
The average English woman lives 709,560 hours. If you spend all the waking ones worrying that this is not enough, will you live one more? Not a chance! So do something more practical than worrying. If you are lying in bed unable to sleep, form a plan for the