6

Worry Doesn’t Help

Since coming home I’ve met dozens of people who have said to me, “I was so worried about you and Martin all that time.” With good intentions, they want me to know that their thoughts were with us during the year of captivity.

They assume, additionally, that I was worried, too. It would be only human nature in such a predicament.

Well, yes, I admit that I worried—although not about some of the things you might suppose.

I decided early on that I wouldn’t worry about the kids. I knew that our mission’s policy was to evacuate family members out of harm’s way as soon as possible. So within a few days of capture, I told myself that Jeff, Mindy, and Zach were no doubt back in the United States. That turned out to be true; they spent the year with Grandpa and Grandma Burnham.

Meanwhile in the steamy jungle, I didn’t have the energy to worry about them, so I made a conscious decision not to do so. I would wonder about them, of course. I’d hike along the trail calculating in my mind what time it was back in Kansas and try to imagine what they might be doing. Morning in the Philippines was the previous evening in America; had the kids gone to bed yet? Were they lying there thinking about us or about something else? What would they get to do for fun that Friday night? When would they see my parents next?

As time went on, we began to get a few letters from them. These were the highlight of our life. Martin and I read them aloud to each other more than once. They filled in a lot of the blanks in our minds.

A different topic for worry, especially for Martin, was the New Tribes Mission flight program across the Philippines. He had been the chief pilot, responsible for everything from personnel to safety training to government paperwork. All of the pilots looked to him for direction.

He had almost finished writing a new training manual, more than a hundred pages long. We were at the proofreading stage, in fact. And now he was totally cut off. Nobody could ask him any questions. All the wealth of data in his brain was out of reach.

Eventually we came to the reluctant conclusion that there was not a single thing we could do about the flight program now. Others would have to step up to the responsibility, so why worry about it?

*   *

Instead, we found other, more immediate things to make us anxious.

Every time I picked out the words “low batt!” amid the various dialects of Abu Sayyaf chatter, my stomach began to churn. Low battery in the cell phone or the satellite phone meant that our only link to the outside world was about to fade. If the captors could not talk to their comrades in town, we might run out of food. If the captors could not talk to the government officials, negotiation would stall.

Even though Martin had tutored them on how to recharge their phones using a string of C-size batteries, they didn’t always remember to do so. The flickering current of those little cylinders was our lifeline. It always irritated me to hear the young guys asking for batteries to run their radios, just so they could listen to music, instead of saving the power for phone use.

I have already written about how traumatized I was whenever the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) began lobbing artillery shells at our camp. The whistle of incoming fire was eerie; we knew we could explode in a blazing inferno any second. Death rode atop those shells.

And the whole tactic was so wrongheaded! This was clearly no way to pluck vulnerable hostages out of a dangerous environment. The AFP was unleashing a no-holds-barred assault that would incinerate terrorists and victims alike if their aim was good enough. The army didn’t seem to be thinking clearly. They were just blasting away with their weaponry, not calculating the possible harm to us.

Yes, I worried. But in the end, no artillery shell ever landed close enough to affect us. God in his mercy spared us from that kind of fiery demolition.

E. Stanley Jones, the Methodist missionary to India, wrote a devotional entitled “Worry Is Atheism” just as World War II was heating up. He was away from his wife and family on a trip, and a well-meaning hostess said to him one evening, “You have had a quiet day; you’ve had time to worry.” Jones writes:

I felt inwardly startled. “Time to worry”—as if a Christian ever has “time to worry”! The Christian has expunged worry from his vocabulary. . . .

A person who worries says, “I cannot trust God; I’ll take things into my own hands.” Result? Worry, frustration, incapacity to meet the dreaded thing when it does come. With God, you can meet it, overcome it, assimilate it into the purpose of your life. Alone, you fuss and fume and are frustrated.

Worry says, “God doesn’t care, and so He won’t do anything—I’ll have to worry it through.” Faith says, “God does care, and He and I will work it out together. I’ll supply the willingness, and He will supply the power—with that combination we can do anything.”

And then Jones tells a wonderful story about the great reformer Martin Luther:

One morning, when he was blue and discouraged, his wife appeared [clothed] in black. At Luther’s inquiry as to what the mourning meant, she replied, “Haven’t you heard? God is dead.”

Luther saw the absurdity—and so should you. God lives—so will you![4]

One dictionary definition of worry is “to torment oneself with disturbing thoughts.”[5] The active verb form is interesting, isn’t it? Worry is something we do to ourselves. It is not an involuntary twitch, an allergic reaction to some mysterious chemical, a spell that is cast upon us from the outside. We initiate the worrying. We torment ourselves.

What we start, we can also stop.

The word’s roots trace back to the Old English wyrgan, “to strangle.” That is precisely what worry does to us; it cuts off our air. It prevents us from inhaling the Divine Breath, the Holy Spirit of God. Instead, it slowly asphyxiates us.

Have you ever sensed that your life was steadily shriveling, closing in upon itself because of a worry spasm? You could no longer see the sun, the hope, the joy of life. Your entire field of vision was consumed with the problem.

In my dictionary, the word worry comes just after wormwood and worn-out. Right behind it comes worse and worst. What an awful page!

What an awful waste of mental energy.

*   *

The antidote to worry, as everyone who has ever read the familiar Philippians 4:6-7 knows, is to turn to the Lord. “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. If you do this, you will experience God’s peace. . . .”

It sounds commonplace, I know. But it is still true.

A unique, perhaps quaint, phrase keeps showing up over a stretch of six chapters in 1 Chronicles: to “inquire of the LORD.” This phrase seems to make all the difference in the outcome of King Saul versus King David. Of the first, this sad epitaph is recorded: “Saul died because he was unfaithful to the LORD; he did not keep the word of the LORD and even consulted a medium for guidance, and did not inquire of the LORD. So the LORD put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David son of Jesse” (10:13-14).

One of David’s first moves upon ascending the throne was to rescue the Ark of the Covenant from the fringes of national life. “ ‘Let us bring the ark of our God back to us, for we did not inquire of it during the reign of Saul.’ The whole assembly agreed to do this, because it seemed right to all the people” (13:3-4).

When the pagan Philistines came up to raid Israel, “David inquired of God . . . [and] the LORD answered him” (14:10). The Israelites won the battle.

But the Philistines soon came back. “So David inquired of God again, and God answered him” (14:14) with an odd set of military instructions about waiting for a certain sound in the treetops before launching the attack. It worked.

The first attempt to bring the Ark to Jerusalem had faltered on a violation of procedure, and at the second attempt David explained, “It was because you, the Levites, did not bring it up the first time that the LORD our God broke out in anger against us. We did not inquire of him about how to do it in the prescribed way” (15:13). This time, the effort was a huge success. In the psalm David wrote for the gala occasion, he included these lyrics: “Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always” (16:11; all 1 Chronicles citations from the New International Version; italics added).

This was the modus operandi of the greatest monarch Israel ever knew. Repeatedly, consistently, even incessantly, he “inquired of the Lord.” The response to that inquiry brought calmness, clarity, and wisdom.

God does not mean for us to sit and fret, stew, agonize, wring our hands, or be troubled. Instead, he invites us to interact with him, to gain his perspective, and to rest in his good and perfect will for our lives.

In the jungle I quickly realized that in order to keep pace with the others on the trail, I was going to need a considerable supply of drinking water. When I didn’t have it, my face would begin to flush, my mouth would go dry, and fatigue would set in rapidly. I would plead with Solaiman or Hurayra or another captor, “Please, I need water. Can you get me some water?”

I would also beg God. “Lord, I need water. It’s really bad. God, help me! I need water.” I was imploring him over and over, almost frantically. I was hammering on heaven’s door.

My anxiety would rise another notch when I watched the Abu Sayyaf using up precious water for purely ceremonial purposes, such as washing their feet or their face before evening prayers. Not being Muslim, I found this to be wholly unnecessary. What a waste of the resource I craved so badly.

Then one day on the trail, as I was harassing God once again, it began to dawn upon me that he knew very well about my need for hydration. He wasn’t oblivious to that fact. My prayers gradually changed from, “God, water—now!” to “Lord, you know what I need. You understand my body’s need for water. Help me be patient until you take care of my need.”

And he did. Not long after, a captor named Zacarias gave me my very own water bottle! It was made of translucent plastic, with a handle and a red top; it held about a liter. I could fill it up myself every time we came to a stream, and no one would take it away from me or ask to use it. I felt God had restored my ability to control the situation.

God is big enough to make his own decisions and manage his own actions. He doesn’t have to run everything by us before he acts. He is in charge, and we are not. If he doesn’t need to worry about the current state of affairs (and obviously he doesn’t), then neither do we.