Article March 1, 2004 Issue

Be proactive instead of worried

By Barbara Vining

I don't think I've ever heard anyone say it's good to worry. Most everyone would agree that allowing negative, fearful thoughts to act upon you, eat at you, distress you, is unhealthy. Worry assumes helplessness and mental passivity. It does nothing to improve things. Like an idling engine, it doesn't move anything forward.

The proverbial advice, "Don't worry," suggests that a person should either be indifferent to the problems at hand, or blindly trust that all will be well. Or that one should keep excessively busy during the daytime, and take sleeping pills at night, in order to keep from worrying. But I believe that these “alternatives” are actually co-conspirators with worry —reinforcing helplessness and mental passivity.

A remark made to me many years ago startled me into realizing that there is an alternative to worry —one that says I am not helpless. One that requires action on my part. A friend said, "Worry is a denial of the Christ." As a student of the Bible and Science and Health, I had come to understand Christ as the voice of God—not as Jesus himself, but the divine Truth that animated the thoughts and actions of Jesus and produced the healings he performed. I had already had some encounters in my own life with this freedom-bringing Truth that Jesus said anyone could come to know and experience (see John 8:31-32). But, until my friend's remark, I had never thought of worry as a denial of Truth and its healing power. Ever since then, I have been finding it helpful and healing to be alert to the onset of worry and to displace it by engaging myself in proactive prayer. This involves spiritual listening and reasoning, in which a person's thought becomes subordinate to God, instead of to human circumstances.