Week 47 Philippians
In the final chapter there’s a phrase I’d underlined sometime before: be anxious for nothing. It caught my attention.
I wondered what it said in a different version. A guy I know left a beat-up old bible at my place quite awhile ago and never asked for it back. So I got it and looked up the verse: do not be anxious about anything. (The guy had highlighted different sentences here-and-there in his bible – blocks of text in blue, yellow, pink, green, orange. He’d used a blue marker on verse six.)
I looked at another version: don’t worry about anything. (Someone who used that bible at some point had circled verse six.)
I remember that the Lord said something like this back in August so I checked: don’t worry about everyday life.
The Lord then, and Paul now seem to be saying that when I come to belief in the Lord anxiety is not really supposed to be part of the mix – I don’t just convert my pre-religious anxieties to new religious ones. Anxiety is one of things I’m dragging along from my former life, my life before-the-Lord.
Still, for me it’s a nearly impossible thing not to feel, nearly impossible not to be anxious, and I finish chapter four with the same uneasy feeling I had back in Matthew in August, a bit anxious about how I hang onto anxiety.
Note: quotes from Philippians 4:6 (NASB, NIV, NLT) and Matthew 6:25 (NLT)