Matt W Cook

Casting all your cares on him is a wonderfully therapeutic exercise. After a wonderful weekend Ruth and I ran into a massive wall of stresses and difficulties all in one day. It shook us huge. I wish you were here so I could tell you all about it. As it is just imagine five (count ’em, five) nasty, unsolvable stresses coming at you within one hour from five different angles. Not so fun, if you ask me. So Ruth and I sat down at home, totally depressed and thoroughly tired.

So we prayed.

And prayed once more.

And then we got it. Cast all your cares on him. Do not be anxious about anything, but tell King Jesus about it all and let him handle it. Anything I ask in his name he’ll do. Really? Is that true? Will the peace of God that surpasses understanding really guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus? We decided that it was.

And so we prayed again. We made a big list of all the crap that was tearing the life out of our souls. Just then the power went out. So I grabbed a candle and lit it. The rest seemed pretty obvious. We held hands and held the paper. We prayed about each one and gave it all to King Jesus. And then into the fire it went. It burned fast. And as we threw the burning paper to the ground we felt all the burdens lift and we laughed. We actually laughed out loud. We got up, stamped on the now harmless stresses and danced together. It was all done.

‘cuz who of us by worrying can add a single hour to his life? When we worry we are saying that we don’t actually trust King Jesus to take care of it for us! Today we saw that our stresses weren’t from outside, but inside. We get anxious and stressed because we don’t actually believe that God is working everything together for our good. That’s really the only reason, eh? If I knew it was good for me I wouldn’t get so upset.

So chew on that for a while, and next time the stuff hits the fan grab a pack of matches and hit your knees. God wants to show you what cool things he can build out of your problems.

Here’s some recent words.

And here’s some pictures:

These are the ashes left over by those sillyy little stresses. Harmless-looking, eh? That’s because they actually did turn out to be harmless in the end.