When you’re taking on a task like the one we are, and you have a goal that’s positively absurd, and you have children, and you’re trying to buy a house, and you and your wife are holding down full-time jobs, it’s easy to get a little stressed. More so, even, if you also have a proclivity towards keeping up to date on politics. I do, unfortunately. My desire and drive to plant a field full of nuts has a great deal to do with the anxiety I feel when I look around at the world of American politics and see the abject foolishness of both the politicians and the people who vote for them.
I’m a “prepper” of sorts. Not necessarily the guns-and-bunkers kind, just the kind that wants to be able to keep feeding his family during the next Great Depression, or Great Reset, or whatever manmade horrors beyond my comprehension.
Preparing for the future is a biblically sound principle. Consider Proverbs 6:6-8:
6 Go to the ant, O sluggard;
consider her ways, and be wise.
7 Without having any chief,
officer, or ruler,
8 she prepares her bread in summer
and gathers her food in harvest.
But while preparation is a means of honoring God, being overwhelmed by anxiety is most certainly not. There is myriad support for this idea throughout the Scriptures:
Matthew 6:34
Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Psalm 46
1 God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
3 though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah
4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
7 The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah
8 Come, behold the works of the LORD,
how he has brought desolations on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
11 The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah
Matthew 6:25-27
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?
Psalm 116:7
Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you.
The challenge of my spiritual growth lately (among others, I can assure you) has been squaring the two of these concepts, God-honoring preparation for an uncertain future and remaining restful in God’s promises to care for us. My fundamental sin, as silly as it sounds, is a belief that hazelnuts will save me. The anxiety comes when I think “I need to plant hazelnuts NOW or my family will starve when Donald Hussein W. Biden presses the big red button.” Luckily, that lie suffers in the sunlight–I couldn’t possibly plant enough hazelnuts to stave off starvation in the next 10 years, and a catastrophic situation would probably preclude me from travelling the many miles from my home to the orchard on a regular basis. Hazelnuts make a poor savior.
Recently I lost my job, and was forced out of a highly competitive Nurse Practitioner program over a strongly held personal conviction against taking a vaccine for a disease I already had immunity for. My wife also lost her job. Prior to making this huge decision, I prayed for wisdom and humility. I didn’t want the vaccine, but if it was God’s will for me to take it, so be it. After a long period of prayer, I felt confident that I was making the right decision.
Since then, God has blessed our family richly with opportunities I could have only dreamed of. Losing my job and my educational prospects freed me up to take on more projects like this one, and I found employment with pay that is likely greater than what I’d be making as a new graduate NP. To my mind, it is impossible not to see the hand of God in what would otherwise be a nightmare scenario for me.
The anxiety I feel when I hear about the next stupid thing the government is doing and think “I gotta plant more food!” is nothing but a faithless blindness to the rich blessings God has explicitly given to me in the face of my specific bugbear–governmental overreach. It’s a failure to realize that God cares for me and has the capacity to provide for me totally out of His rich abundance.
So lately I’ve been feeling better–less anxious, and more joyful. I know that God will take care of me and my family in exactly His time and His ways.
In the meanwhile though, you can catch me outside planting hazelnuts at a brisk but contented pace, free from anxiety. After all,
“Nothing is better for a man than to eat and drink and enjoy his work. I have also seen that this is from the hand of God. For apart from Him, who can eat and who can find enjoyment? To the man who is pleasing in His sight, He gives wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner He assigns the task of gathering and accumulating that which he will hand over to one who pleases God.” (Ecclesiastes 2:24-26a)
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