If you’re not anxious sometimes in the world of 2024, please write about your experience of a placid life and how you’re doing it. Most of us are anxious some, if not much of the time. Even outside the anxieties of everyday life, there is a feeling of gravity in the world right now. There is a looming feeling of dread I’ve seen a few articles about here on Substack, and I notice more and more that people are finding the current state of affairs intolerable.
Aside from all the outside pressure, you might be experiencing internal pressure too. At risk of oversharing, I have some great expectations for my own life, and I tend to spend more time than I should thinking about the future. I worry about being able to buy real estate, to provide for my family, and to build something worth passing down.
In a recent conversation, I shared with my priest that I had been worrying and fretting about unreal possibilities instead of concentrating on my day-to-day life. He gave me an excellent piece of advice that I want to share with you:
“Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these will be added unto you.”
You might be overcomplicating your approach to life, like I am. You should join me in learning to focus on today. Turns out life is simpler than I think.
Here’s the full passage from Matthew 6. If you’re a skimmer, I bolded important bits for brevity (but you’re a superior Substack reader, just soak in the whole passage, Theophilus):
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Thanks be to God.
Thus sayeth the lord! Quit worrying about it. He wants you to concentrate on what you’re doing. I wrote a previous article about living in the moment based on the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. In that work, a demon tempter seeking to damn some poor man’s soul tries to take his human target’s attention off living morally in the present and fixate him on satisfying unrealized, long-term ends.
Even if your imagined future ends are good, distracting yourself from everyday life, from immediate concerns, takes you out of the present. You’re in far more danger of becoming a utilitarian moralist or a great-causer out to ‘change the world’ and thereby neglecting the lives of those you’re sitting next to.
I’m guilty of this. Sometimes it’s more attractive to imagine the good you’re going to do someday when you’re in a different place and when you’re a different man. But today, you’re not. You’re where and when you are, and that is the moment where the Lord expects you to do good. To seek His kingdom.
He knows you need things down the road. He promises they’ll be there. The question is, how much do you trust Him? Show Him faith in the present, and He’ll worry about your future for you.
Life is a very long endurance run. There’s a lot of work to do. Physically, modern life may be easier. But in the modern era, life is very complicated and psychologically challenging. The noise, the glut of information, and the pace of life all breed anxiety in you.
One cure the Gospel offers for that is a spiritual life lived for the day. The silence of prayer combats noise. Trust in the Lord’s word combats a thousand suggestions about what you should or shouldn’t do. Living in the rhythm of the liturgical seasons slows life to a humane pace.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the next decade. I think you’ll agree whatever happens will probably be significant. Substack is notorious for predicting and wargaming the near future, and suggesting possible worlds you can build thereafter. But all that stresses you out. There’s a lot to do and a lot to go through in the near future. Everyone senses it. But you need to give up worry and do good where you are.
Do what’s right for the day. You’ll be better equipped to face the future; the Lord promises that He will provide. For Christians anxious about the future, remember that there is no utopian vision for the Earth- seek the heavenly Kingdom and His righteousness, for that is your salvation. If you focus on that, all the other things you need will be added to you.