Article February 11, 1928 Issue

Why Worry?

HELEN S. SAVAGE

The understanding of God's omnipotence brought to bear upon any adverse situation or any condition deemed unfavorable to right happiness or success will, with the power of celestial truth, begin at once to destroy the sense of worry and distress, and to replace these false beliefs with true sentiments, hope in God, and confidence both in His ability to help at all times and under all circumstances and in His willingness to do so. Our part is meekly and whole-heartedly to accept the truth that God is entirely good, and to rejoice in the fact, knowing that it precludes the possibility of a so-called evil power interfering with or finding place or acceptance within us.

Christians have always accepted the gospel teaching that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. While at times this acceptance has been faltering and the understanding of it slight, it has, nevertheless, always comforted, helped, and sustained the trusting one until better understanding and fuller acceptance came.

It is passing strange that Christians, having possession of this encouraging teaching, should ever so far lose sight of it as to fall into the habit of worrying. Perhaps this habit is one of the most prevalent of the age, though not peculiar to it, by any means. In the remarkable experience of the patriarch Job, for instance, are shown the doleful results of indulging this undermining habit. The conscious rectitude, the fine integrity, of this servant of God had resisted and routed the errors of belief in misfortune and bereavement most splendidly, and his trust in his Lord remained unshaken. Even when worry over sense-testimony as to his physical condition had beset him, and had persisted so that it seemed as if the very depths of discouragement had been plumbed, even then he cried, "Oh that I knew where I might find him!" Then the forgetfulness of the power of ever present good was uncovered as error, and, his thought transformed by the understanding and acceptance of God as good, "the inward voice became to him the voice of God," as Mrs. Eddy explains this voice in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 321) when referring to Moses' experience of healing. "Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me," spake the voice to Job; and the lessons of divine Love's nearness and omnipotence were taught by illustrations from the solar system, the waves, and the wind. Then those marvelous questions propounded in these illustrations, recorded in the thirty-eighth chapter of the book of Job, so roused the patriarch's understanding of God's tender, never ceasing care for His children that gratitude and praise completely flooded his consciousness and washed away all fear of or belief in grief and worry, and replaced these false beliefs with the consciousness of God alone. From this vantage ground Job could gladly testify, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee."

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