OK, I'll admit it, I'm a worrier. I come by it honestly. I was born into a long line of worriers. My Mom will admit she's in the mix, and her mother before her was the queen supreme of worrying. Case in point, my grandmother used to have her bags packed days in advance for a trip (Afraid she'd forget something? Miss her flight? I'm not sure). We've always laughed about it, but it really was just an outward manifestation of the worry that gripped her.
As a Christian, I'm aware of all the biblical instruction on worry (and why not to do it). For instance, Matthew 6:27-30 assures me that worrying accomplishes nothing and that God, who cares for the smallest wildflower, cares for me. Jesus has a similar message in Luke 12:22-26, and goes on to ask how worrying about something will add a single hour to my life? And yet I struggle.
No matter how hard I try, there are some stressful situations in life where I go directly to my default setting and worry. This has been known to happen when one of my kids is sick (what is a simple cold quickly becomes pneumonia in my mind), or when Greg is working late one night and forgets to call to give me a head's up (surely he's been in a terrible car accident). More often I'm tripped up by legitimate things like worrying that we won't have money to cover our bills, that I'm not parenting my kids well, or that I've said something to offend someone. Other times it's relatively small things like wondering how I'm going to get everything on my to-do list done before picking the kids up from school that causes me more worry than necessary.
You would think that having a young child coming to stay with us for four weeks...a child who is not my own, an orphan from another country, who doesn't speak my language, who has possibly experienced some traumatic events in her short life, and who has very likely never known a proper loving family relationship...would be one of those things that I am completely enveloped in worry about. I, for one, would have expected the insomnia to have set in by now, the obsessive list-making to have begun, the fretting and hand wringing over all the things I don't know about her, and the concern over the lack of details I have at my disposal in preparation for her visit to be all consuming.
But I'm not worried. Not one bit. We started this journey with a prayer and God has very clearly answered it. Since then, He has continued to answer our prayers and to meet our every need to make Nastya's visit possible. I can even look back to points beyond this past Summer and my first awareness of New Horizons and see that God had already set our feet on this path.
Philippians 4:6-7 says "do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
Thank you Lord for granting me/us peace in this decision and for helping the planning for Nastya's visit to come together so seamlessly. It is unburdened, and with joyful anticipation that we look forward to her arrival in 22 days!
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