A man went to a psychologist and said, “Doctor, sometimes I feel like a Tepee and at other times I feel like a Wigwam.” The doctor thought about it for a moment and then he said, “I better treat you for anxiety. You’re two tents!”

Anxiety and stress are no joke, however. As Charlie Brown once put it, ‘even my anxieties have anxieties!’

There is always something to worry about, and with the current situation in Ukraine and the past two years worrying about Covid-19, anxiety and stress are at an extremely high level. Dave reminded us on Sunday morning, however, that Jesus’s response to this was ‘do not worry.‘ (see Matt 6:25-34) We may feel this was unreasonable of Him, but in fact, He reminds us all that there is more to life than the material and that God is our Father who cares for us and looks after us.

If we are going to conquer worry, we must come to the realisation that God loves us and that He will take care of us but so many people are simply not convinced of this fact. Many of them are Christians. But if you really believe that God is in charge, and that He loves you and will meet your needs, then you can relax in faith. If for some reason you do not believe that God will take care of you, then you will be unable to relax. You will feel that it is up to you to take care of all your needs, physical, emotional, and even spiritual.

Jesus calls us to seek God’s kingdom first and to live one day at a time. If we do this, then we find we have strength (and grace) for each day and can live without the crippling burden of worry. We are ultimately faced with a simple choice: will we trust God or not? We can choose to borrow trouble from tomorrow and live life as if God is not there, or we can trust Him and seek Him with all our hearts. If we will do this (see Prov 3:5-6), we will find an alternative to anxiety and stress and will be able to praise God in all circumstances, as Habakkuk did (Hab 3:17-18).

This week’s Lent theme is ‘trusting’. We start with quite an unusual passage, the story of Naaman’s healing. (2 Kings 5:1-3, 9-15). Naaman was a commander of the army of the king of Aram, a person with high social standing, but his life was blighted by a skin disease. In desperation, he listened to the word of his slave girl (taken from Israel) and went to the prophet Elisha, seeking healing. It can’t have been easy for him to trust the word of a slave, and when he got to the prophet, he was offended by the fact he did not come to meet him personally but simply gave him instructions to wash in the river Jordan. Naaman had to let go of his pride in order to trust this word from God’s man; the result was cleansing and healing.

Listening to the words of other people and trusting them enough to act on them are not easy things to do. We have to open our hearts to the words of God, being prepared to listen for them, whatever their source (for God can use anyone to speak to us, even a donkey in the case of Balaam!) and then act on them. Trust is not easy for us, but if we can let go of our pride as Naaman did, we can see healing and deliverance.

Hebrews 6:13-20 talks of hope being an anchor for our soul. The reason we can have this solid anchor is because of the faithfulness of God. The God who makes promises to us is not fickle or fallible, frail or futile. We can look back at the many promises He has made (such as giving a son to Abraham and his wife, Sarah when they were old and unable to have children) and see that God’s promises are certain and unchangeable. This gives us great encouragement to hold on to God’s promises to us.

Biblical hope is more than cheerful optimism and longer-lasting than a grim-faced attitude of endurance. Sally Welch says, ‘it is a steady attitude of joyful certainty that the endgame has already been played and we are all winners.’ (‘Sharing The Easter Story,’ P 98) Instead of focussing on the times when someone has perhaps made a promise to us and then broken it, we can have hope as an anchor for our soul, keeping us tethered to God in the fiercest of storms.

What are you hoping for? Have your hopes been dashed? ‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick’, we are told in Proverbs 13:12, and most of us have had many of our hopes, plans and dreams crushed in the past two years. Weddings have been postponed or taken place with only a handful of people present; holidays have been cancelled; we were perhaps unable to visit friends and family as we had hoped to do. Yet humans have a tenacious capacity for hope. Even when our hopes have been dashed time and time again, we still tend to rise up from the ashes and hope for new things!

Paul wrote to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 2:17-20, speaking of his desire to visit them again. He really hoped to be able to return to Thessalonica, but circumstances just weren’t favourable; ‘Satan blocked our way.’ For Paul, these people whom he had led to faith in Christ, were his hope, his joy, his glory and even if he never sees them again, he can have hope for their future as Christians and all that they will do and be. ‘By sharing our hopes for each other and our communities, we can plant seeds of new life, nurture them and see them grow into something beautiful,’ Sally Welch says in her book ‘Sharing The Easter Story.’ (P 94)

I believe passionately that God has good plans for our communities, that we should learn to love where we live and see the Dearne Valley area with God’s eyes. Our hopes and plans may well be dashed, but God’s hopes and plans will thrive and endure.

In Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, he speaks of ‘your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.’ (1 Thess 1:3) Endurance doesn’t always get a good press these days; it has a dour, prosaic sound to it and doesn’t seem very appealing! But the ability to endure, to persevere, to carry on is an invaluable quality, especially when it’s inspired by hope.

Inspiration sounds much more exciting and inviting to us; it reminds us of the artist, the musician, the author. But the Christian life involves combining endurance and inspiration. We can’t just afford to be inspired for a moment; every artist, musician and writer knows that those flashes of inspiration have to be fleshed out in the monotony of practice and the grind of self-discipline. So too our faith has to be lived in both the valleys and the mountain tops, in the everyday and the mundane as well as in the drama of the miraculous. Paul wrote to believers who were facing death and were not quite sure how to reconcile this with the resurrection of Jesus. He reminded them that they had hope beyond the grave, that their grief was no longer the same as it had been. (1 Thess 4-5) God’s grace is there for us in every situation, ‘there on the wedding day, there in the weeping at the graveside’, as Matt Redman says (‘Your Grace Finds Me’). We have hope beyond the grave, and therefore can endure!

Grief is a strange emotion.

It manifests itself in many ways, ranging from numbed shock and disbelief to resigned acceptance, from sobs that shake the whole body to a dull ache which can’t easily be identified, from the bittersweet memories that have us laughing one moment to weeping the next. Grief can sweep us off our feet some days as we reach out to telephone our loved ones or call to visit, only to remember with fierce regret that we can never do that again. Grief washes over us like the waves of the sea, sometimes fierce, battering, pounding us with apparently relentless, merciless energy, sometimes soft and gentle but still inexorably wet.

There are stages of grief, they tell us, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression and ultimately acceptance, but these are not linear. It can feel as though we inhabit all five at the same time. The world seems surreal. Outwardly, life continues. We eat, we sleep, we go about our daily tasks. We often look no different to others. But there are shadows in our eyes; there is a brain fog in our thinking which renders ordinary decisions almost impossible to take. It’s as if our loved one consumes all our thinking, all our energy, and so we feel lifeless and listless. Sometimes, if death has come after a period of illness, when our emotional energy has been spent caring for and visiting someone, there is physical exhaustion too, but more than anything, grief uses vast stores of emotional energy, leaving us unable to care about anything else.

The Bible offers us hope during the journey of grief, likening life itself to a journey whose destination is not on the world’s shore or borders. It speaks of death like sleep. My younger granddaughter still naps during the daytime, and her older sister frequently becomes impatient during this period, wanting to wake her sister so they can continue to play. We too experience the frustration of impatience: we may have the hope of resurrection and reunion in the future, but there are days when we would do anything to be able to wake the person now, here, in our world, and tell them our news and play with them again.

The Bible does not tell us not to grieve. It acknowledges the reality and inevitabililty of grief in a sin-cursed world. But it does shine light into the dark abyss of grief and remind us that the darkness has not, nor will not, overcome the light. (John 1:5)

As we walk this journey – often crumpled by the wayside, often dragging our heels once the manic activity of organising a funeral abates, often limping with blistered feet and aching hearts, God sustains us in ways that are deeply personal to us. For me, every time I have faced death in person, He has dropped a song into my heart which reorients me to truth. He won’t do this for everyone, but He has ways of grabbing our attention that are deeply personal to us and tailored to our needs, because He is a merciful and compassionate God. We are not alone in our grief. God is there with us, to comfort and to bless.