I don’t know how this past week went for you, but mine was ultra busy. Not only was it somewhat emotionally charged with the last of our four children graduating from the church’s day school—which means after about twenty years of back-and-forths with kids, it’ll be just me from now on—but it took precision to fit everything into each day. With the end-of-school activities, church and school meetings, graduation parties, staff and graduate celebrations today, preparing several sermons for various services, evening activities tonight (including a funeral visitation and a Bible study in my home), the forthcoming week should be a breeze, right?  Well, no. In between a number of these things, I will defend my doctoral thesis before a committee, and I have yet to actually sit and prepare. Each time I’ve tried, life happened, which is to say that other things with much stronger gravitational pull kept my mind and body busy.

The topic of preparedness came up in a phone meeting with my mentor on Thursday. While he implied the event would be incredibly challenging, he said he had every confidence in my abilities. I thanked him, but in secret, I was worried. I knew my own schedule. I also know myself to be a “show up early and have more than one backup plan” kind of guy. In other words, I’m the kind of guy who’ll get the family to the airport three hours too early pulling an overpacked suitcase in tow. But in this instance, things would be different. You might even ask why I’m taking time this morning to write this message. I should be studying.

But there’s something else to think about here.

I experienced a slightly different version of the same conversation several weeks ago at the Livingston County Lincoln Day Dinner. Jennifer was sitting beside Pete Hoekstra (the former Ambassador to the Netherlands, now the Chair of the Michigan Republican Party). During dinner, she told him that I’m the kind of guy who fills every waking moment of his schedule with something, and when I’m done with my current schooling, I’ll almost certainly fill the void with something else. At first, it felt a little like she was confiding in a marriage counselor who, unlike most others, could make a call on his government phone and have me eighty-sixed. But then I had a moment of clarity. When it comes to one’s level of busyness, we all have our fair share of self-inflicted distractions. The fact that I was sitting at that dinner when I should have been home studying is an example. And so the point: in the final cost/benefit analysis of our lives, we all spend time doing things that, in the end, may or may not be of value.

Don’t get me wrong. My time at the dinner was valuable in ways I won’t go into here. Still, discernment is necessary. A person can’t and shouldn’t say yes to everything. That said, do you want to know what one of the most considerable time-wasting activities is? Worrying. The thing is, I seem to have been doing more than my fair share of it the last few days.

I suppose I could jump straight to Matthew 6:25-34. It’s there the Lord discourages worrying. Actually, the word is μεριμνᾶτε, which the English Standard Version translates as “to be anxious.” That’s probably a better understanding than “worry.” In one sense, I’ve always sort of felt as though worry could be interchangeable with heightened concern, depending on the situation. Concerned awareness or readiness is often mistaken for worry. As a Christian, such readiness has the potential for action. It leads to something. When faced with a concerning situation, either the person will trust in Christ while being moved to take every reasonable action, or the person will crumple over and into anxiety, somehow believing everything depends on him and all hope is lost. In other words, anxiety is worry that’s been slow-roasted by hopelessness. Christ says four times throughout ten verses not to go there. Instead, He urges His listeners to seek first the kingdom of God.

The Lord’s point is quite simple. Despair—anxious worry—is the inevitable result of a starved hope. Therefore, feed the hope, not the worry. To do this, seek first the kingdom. Seek Jesus. I say this because where the kingdom is, there, too, is its King. Hope is abundant with Him (1 Peter 1:3-6). Concerned Christians know to look to Him first, not the self. As they do, real peace is both assured and given (John 14:27). They are not surrendered to the terrors of anxiety, no matter the monsters that threaten.

Anyone familiar with the stuff I scribble will remember a perspective I hold to rather strictly. I learned the perspective from Saint Paul. The more I hold to it, the less worrisome or hectic things become. Take a look at 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54-57 and you’ll see what I mean. Essentially, I’ve learned that the day a person realizes the only thing he has to lose is Christ is the same day he becomes impenetrable to pretty much every terrorizing monster this world can conjure. This includes death. If not even death can frighten me, then everything else is cake, including a thesis defense. Besides, life is far too short to be despairing about this thing or that thing that may or may not go one way or another.

I’m sure I’ll be just fine on Wednesday. In fact, if I really think about it, the last few years have been nothing but preparatory. I know what I’m doing. I’ve lived all 296 pages (and then some) of my final paper. If I stumble a little here and there during the defense examination, so what? I’m not perfect. But Jesus is, and He has me well in hand. Resting there, I can scrap every ill-weighted concern and then stand back and watch the horizon of mental and physical free time open.

Of course, I’ll bet you can guess what I’m likely to do in those spaces. That’s right! I’m going to fill them. Trust me when I tell you I already have a few ideas.