Torn In Two Directions

Matthew 6:25–34

I worry. Not occasionally — daily. Payroll before the wages clear. A lease clause I have read three times and still cannot un-read. A Restarter who has stopped answering his phone, and I do not know whether he has overslept or slipped back. The worry arrives before I have ground the first dose of the morning.

The Greek behind “worry” carries the sense of being torn in two directions. That is exactly right. I am not torn between faith and unbelief — I am torn between faith and self-reliance, which is a far more respectable idol. Self-reliance wears a lanyard. It looks like diligence. But when I am in that phase, I am lost and I am vulnerable. I become short with the team, cold in prayer, the opposite of the man I was discipled to be. Anxiety does not merely make me uncomfortable. It makes me unlike Christ.

Jesus does not scold the worrier. He reasons with him, gently, from the lesser to the greater. If the Father feeds birds that neither sow nor reap, and dresses grass that will be thrown into the oven tomorrow, how much more will He clothe you? That is not sentiment. It is a reckoning of worth. I am not a sparrow. I am a son.

And I have the receipts. There was an outlet that should have finished us; I still call it a failure, because it was. Yet here we are — nine years on, more than S$1.7 million in wages placed into the hands of men society had written off, a café roasting its own beans, an Academy taking shape in a space we could never have afforded on our own arithmetic. Not one cent of that arrived because I worried well. Every cent arrived because the Father who feeds birds had already decided to feed us.

So the instruction is not “stop worrying”. It is “seek first”. Follow the string back — to the Kingdom, to His righteousness, to His presence in the middle of an ordinary Friday. Worry is loud, but it is not load-bearing. He is.