Who shall I fear?

If you have ever had an anxiety attack they are no fun for sure. You feel kind of like you can't breathe and the situation you are in seems inescapable and overwhelming. Anxiety is just plain and simple worry.  It is hard to control anxiety or worry when you let it manifest and continue to grow in your thoughts day after day.  I'm pretty sure we are all guilty of that. I worry about whether or not people like me, if I will have enough money to do anything besides pay my bills, my family, being single forever, getting wrinkles, not having enough pairs of sandals, etc.  Obviously I worry about important and some not so important things. Does worry about any of this help???? No. Of course not. I love the book of James and in his writings James says:

 "Look here you who say 'Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year.  We will do business there and make a profit.' How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog--it's here a little while, then it's gone.  What you ought to say is, 'If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.'  Otherwise you are boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil."

Or there is Matthew 6:34 when Jesus tells the disciples:

"So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today."

And of course David and his poetry says so eloquently in Psalm 55:22 :

"Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you."

I feel like at times we are all paralyzed with this anxiousness and have a worried spirit. I was bogged down with this for a better part of a year and the only reason I moved out of it was because I realized the Lord controls everything anyway.  Why should I waste precious time that I could spend serving Him and making His name known worrying about things I can and never will be able to control? There is no good answer to this except that I and we shouldn't be.
 As I child I was scared of the dark (don't tell anyone but I still kind of am) and my mom would sit with me as I went to sleep and she would say  "When you are afraid put your trust in Him" until I believed it.  It is still kind of like that now.  I sit in the darkness of apprehension, angst and concern and Jesus is there with me saying "When you are afraid put your trust in Me."

"Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of it's strength."

 -Corrie Ten Boom