Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
1 Peter 5:6-7 (NIV)
Anxiety and the Mighty Hand
Two brothers who run a mill together have learned to get out of each other’s way. The younger one steps back from the chute without looking up when he hears his brother coming. Flour is in the seams of their sleeves and in the hair on their arms, and it will be in the truck until it rains.
That looks a great deal like clothing yourselves with humility toward one another, which Peter asks of everybody in this letter, young and old. Look at it a second longer and it turns out to be a working arrangement in a small building, learned because two men colliding at the same chute six times a morning would ruin it. It costs either brother nothing he wanted.
Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. That therefore reaches back to the humility among people, and then it turns and sets a man under something far bigger than his brother at the chute. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. He puts both in front of the same people.
Put like that, the casting can start to sound like a test of pride, as though a worry still turning in you tonight means you failed at humbling yourself. Anxiety is also an illness, and an illness gets care, the way a torn shoulder gets care. Having one says nothing about the strength of anybody’s faith. Peter is handing everyone in that letter a place to put the weight. Nobody is being timed on how fast they get it there.
The lifting comes with a clock attached, and the clock is his. In due time. Nothing here says which year that is, and the mill will need the same repairs in the meantime.
Peter tells them that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings. That shortens nothing. It does move a man out of the middle of his own trouble, where the view is worst, and set him among people carrying something similar who aren’t writing to him about it.
The younger brother can’t get a sack up off the floor by himself. Stepping aside at the chute never taught him how to say so, and his brother is ten feet away.
If the worry went tonight where Peter says to send it, what would you get up and do in the morning?
A Prayer to Remember
Take the thing that has been turning over in us since Sunday, and take it again tomorrow when we pick it back up. For the ones whose worry is an illness, send steady care, and people who don’t explain it away. Let the lifting come when you say it comes.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
