Weekend Speaker Redmond - Pastor Greg Rohlinger
Weekend Speaker Issaquah- Pastor Rusty Gerhart
Theme: I Can's Stop Worrying
Read: Matthew 6:24-26; Philippians 4:6-7
Think: Back in the days just before Y2K was supposed to “change everything”, I recall running a retirement calculator for the first time. I had just loaded up Microsoft Money 99 and was watching it tally up what my stock options had done over the previous couple of years. I had a blue chip position with a high tech leading employer, and would be fully vested within a couple years… Figuring out what those options would potentially net me if they held their current value was exciting. Being not quite 40, it seemed like a pretty good place to be sitting! If I had to sum up my mental outlook at the time it would have been a bit like that old new-wave classic: “The Future’s So Bright, I Got to Wear Shades”.
Well, you probably know a bit about how that story has unfolded in the dozen years since. The dot com crash collapsed and flattened the tech stock market in 2001. After a few years of stagnant performance on the company stock eating away at my anxious ungrateful heart, I started to buy stuff I didn’t need to console myself from the worry, impatience and anxiety to enjoy the “good life” I had fully expected would be mine. That only made things worse.
By 2006, my struggling marriage had failed and I was getting divorced, which of course took that stale performing 401k I was getting so eaten up about and decisively divided it further in half. However, remarriage a couple years later gave a chance to start again with a new house, a new mortgage with a renewed faith in God’s grace and mercy! I started over in nest and nest egg building. But just as I was getting started on this new path, the market took another tumble and I watched as the house I bought at the market’s peak drop steadily in value over the next several years (which is where it is today).
That Microsoft Money I used to rely on (literally, the product and more figuratively the phenomenon of accidental wealth) disappeared from the market some time ago. Now that I am remarried and closer to 50, my current wife and I sat down not too long ago to look at a retirement calculator. It was nothing like the outcome I envisioned over a decade ago when I was beaming with optimism for what lay ahead. But just as that earlier number was more than it proved to be, I try to remember that the number I am looking at today is likely to matter less than it appears to right now.
How can I be so sure? Well, worrying about the money I would have or not have later never (in and of itself) added one dollar more to my pocket in the twelve years since I first started to think about such things seriously. And as Pastor Greg reminded us, look at the birds. They didn’t have a retirement package then. And then don’t have one today either. And they are still singing, nest building and flying high and free. And as Jesus reminds us in Matthew 6, I’m still worth a lot more to God than they are.
Do: Ask “what things has God brought me in the way of spiritual assets (i.e. wisdom, gratitude) where my worldly assets have been diminished?” Then practice a habit of giving thanks for them when you are worried this week.
Pray: God, you have always kept me cared for and always will, be it in times of poverty or times of plenty. Help me to trust that your heart has not changed even as the world around me has. Amen.
The eDevotional is written each week by a team of volunteers from Timberlake Church.