Keep Calm and Carry On

 ‘…Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God’ (John 14:1)

From John 14:1-12 (Year A: Easter 5)

‘Don’t worry’ is a common turn of phrase and advice to someone who is very anxious. It is easy to advise it when the one saying it is not faced with redundancy, sickness, an awaited medical result or some other source of acute anxiety. Worry is part of life and is impossible to avoid. However, we can manage our worrying by focussing on the positive and not just the negative. One way of doing this is through faith – understood as a loving, trusting and binding relationship with others or with Other. Trust as a term is even more relevant here than simply believing in this or that truth. Belief that shows itself in a calm, trusting stance in the middle of bedlam, conflict and great uncertainty is a gift. We just need to be open to it.  However, there is something that flows from trust and it is this – God will act at the right time and in the right place and in the right way.

In Psalm 37 it is written:

Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.

The following lines are from a poem by Louise Haskins and quoted by King George VI in one of the darkest hours of history (December 1939):

“I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year,
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be better than light, and safer than a known way.’”