Prayer and Stress

This morning, in a conversation with my husband, I experienced again the stress that financial difficulty puts on a relationship. When there's plenty of money in the bank, it's easier. But when the bills increase and money is tight, tempers flare. Our marriage is like a bridge or a building that does not show the cracks in the foundation until it is stressed.

So where are our cracks? And how do we repair them?

Or better, where are my cracks?

It is difficult to explain, but when I sit with God in the silence, with all the stress of my life, he begins to fill in the cracks. I'm not even sure how it happens. Part of it is a changed perspective. Prayer is what takes me out of the immediate mess, raises me to a great distance above the mess, and allows me to look down on the entire landscape of my life through eyes other than my own.

Reading Scripture is seeing things through God's eyes. This week I assigned my study group the reading of Matthew 6. Zingo! In my husband's and my anxiety about falling income and rising needs, I read these words:

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 important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 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? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? . . . So do not worry, saying, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" or "What shall we wear?" For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

So I sit in silence with my Father and listen. With my lack of understanding and lack of trust, I wait. When I am finished with this time, I cannot see the future any better than when I started. But some of the cracks are beginning to fill in, and I feel a more stable foundation under me. My anxiety is less. This is God's doing, not mine, apparently. I can breathe again, and say that this day is good, that it will never come again, and that I will do well to enjoy it. "Give us this day our daily bread." A good prayer.