forecasting grief

I am by nature a worrier. It's never kept me from anything (i.e. getting on a plane, moving 1,000 miles away for college, driving through a blizzard), but it does occupy a lot of my daily thought time. I know that it shouldn't, but it does. And lately, I feel like it's been on hyperdrive thanks to the endless coverage of crime after terrible, terrifying crime. With each breaking headline the past few weeks, my heart has broken and tears have fallen; it is hard to comprehend the extreme pain that countless families, friends, neighbors, and relatives around the nation are experiencing thanks to a few seconds of foolishness.

Often times, all this sadness and loss makes me wonder and worry about what I could lose. What if Tim gets in a car accident on the way to work? What if I make a good friend here and then she ends up moving away? What if we have a baby someday and _______ goes wrong? What if...?

These thoughts just start snowballing into each other until I'm reminded that God has a master plan for my life, plans to give me hope and a future. And that these thoughts of worry should not hold me back from living a full life because I am not to live my life in a spirit of fear. I love Elisabeth Elliot's words about the business of "forecasting grief":

Is it our business to pry into what may happen tomorrow? It is a difficult and painful exercise which saps the strength and uses up the time given us today. Once we give ourselves up to God, shall we attempt to get hold of what can never belong to us - tomorrow? Our lives are His, our times in his hand, He is Lord over what will happen, never mind what may happen. When we prayed, "Thy will be done," did we suppose He did not hear us? He heard indeed, and daily makes our business His and partakes of our lives. If my life is once surrendered, all is well. Let me not grab it back, as though it were in peril in His hand but would be safer in mine! Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business. If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future, I will strain my spiritual eyes so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now.

Jesus did not promise that this journey called life would be easy, smooth, and without pain - that's what happens in a broken and sinful world. But He has promised to never give us more than we can handle and to walk with us through the storms. I need to remember that.