Worry is as multiform and as diverse as are the people who worry.
Indeed worriers are the most ingenious persons in the world. When
every possible source of worry seems to be removed, they proceed
immediately to invent some new cause which an ordinary healthful mind
could never have conceived.
The causes of worry are innumerable. They represent the sum total
of the errors, faults, missteps, unholy aims, ambitions, foibles,
weaknesses and crimes of men. Every error, mistake, weakness, crime,
etc., is a source of worry--a cause of worry. Worry is connected only
with the weak, the human, the evil side of human nature. It has no
place whatever in association with goodness, purity, holiness, faith,
courage and trust in God. When good men and women worry, in so far as
they worry they are not good. Their worry is a sign of weakness, of
lack of trust in God, of unbelief, of unfaithfulness. The man who
knows God and his relationship to man; who knows his own spiritual
nature and his relationship to God _never worries_. There is no
possible place in such a man's life for worry.
Hence it will be seen that I believe worry to be evil, and nothing but
evil, and, therefore, without one reclaiming or redeeming feature, for
it can be productive of nothing but evil.
If you really desire to know the sources of your worry _study each
worry as it comes up_. Analyse it, dissect it, weigh it, examine it
from every standpoint, judge it by the one test that everything in
life must, and ought to submit to, viz.: its usefulness. What use
is it to you? How necessary to your existence? How helpful is it in
solving the problems that confront you; how far does it aid you in
their solution, wherein does it remove the obstacles before your
pathway. Find out how much it strengthens, invigorates, inspires you.
Ask yourself how much it encourages, enheartens, emboldens you. Put
down on paper every slightest item of good, or help, or inspiration
it is to you, and on the other hand, the harm, the discouragement, the
evil, the fears it brings to you, and then strike a balance.
I can tell you beforehand that after ten years' study--if so long were
necessary--you will fail to find one good thing in favor of worry,
and that every item you will enumerate will be against it. Hence, why
worry? Quit it!
Worry, like all evils, feeds on itself, and grows greater by its own
exercise. Did it decline when exercised, diminish when allowed a free
course, one might let it alone, even encourage it, in order that it
might the sooner be dead. But, unfortunately, it works the other
way. The more one worries the more he continues to worry. The more
he yields to it the greater becomes its power. It is a species of
hypnotism: once allow it to control, each new exercise diminishes the
victim's power of resistance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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