Hello and Happy Tuesday, My Friend!
Is anybody out there a worry wart? Do you see me raising both hands and still managing to type this note? I’m getting better at this awful affliction, but something this past week reminded me of a time I about worried my head completely off my body and I wanted to share it with you today.
The year was 1978. I was a high and mighty 17-year-old. I’d just graduated from high school and would soon go to college. It was early in the summer, so I wasn’t too nervous about leaving home yet. I had all summer to prepare for that.
As most colleges do, there was a freshmen orientation for the incoming newbies early in the summer. Both of my older siblings had gone to college at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and that’s where I was going as well. I knew that city like the back of my hand since I’d been to visit multiple times. So when I went off to this orientation stuff, I thought I was way above it all. Excuse me, but do you have freshmen orientation for kids who already know all this stuff? You know, for cool kids like me? The answer was no. (And in no world was I one of the “cool kids.”)
I was going to be a music therapy major at school, and I had to sign up for concert band and marching band. These two classes required a “prerequisite slip” to register. Two different band classes meant I needed two little pink prerequisite forms. When I picked up those forms in the music department, someone told me sternly, “Don’t lose these slips!”
Me? Lose papers? Did this person not know to whom she was speaking? I was organized! I was responsible! I was a good student! Ain’t no way I’m going to lose any important papers!
Now for a bit of background: My sister was a music major before me. She had been all through college by the time I got there, and she could tell me a few things. Of utmost importance was who the good teachers were and who the scary teachers were. It just so happened that the signature on the bottom of these precious pink slips in my possession was none other than the scariest college professor in the history of scary college professors. He was the top band director and basically the top dog of all the dogs in the instrumental music department at UWEC. He was a man of slight stature but had a HUGE reputation. He demanded excellence from his students. (Imagine that.) Just looking at his signature on those pink slips made me nervous.
After I’d followed all the steps for becoming a well-informed new student at UWEC, it was time for me to go to the registrar’s office and sign up for my classes. I recall being in some semblance of a line and shuffling slowly up to the desk when it was my turn. A woman was helping us new kids on the block get our classes in order. I smiled and handed her whatever papers I had in my hand.
“Alright, now . . . and do you have your prerequisite slips for your two band classes?” she asked me.
“Of course, they’re right, he . . . . . . ” But they weren’t right there. They weren’t right anywhere. I searched my folder of papers, my pockets, my purse, and the girl’s purse next to me (she didn’t like that). They were gone. They vanished. They disappeared.
I felt my heart start to race and my face get hot. I was keenly aware that my freckles had all melded into one red-hot hue. My eyes got big, and my life started to flash before my eyes. The slips that someone told me to “NOT LOSE” were lost. I was picturing this band director stabbing me with his conducting baton. I froze when I realized those slips were nowhere. As mortified as I was feeling on the inside, I was trying so hard to conceal it. It did not work, though, as the woman at the desk (or was it one of the kids next to me?) said, “Are you alright?”
I managed to squeak out the words, “I lost my pink slips, my prerequisite forms.” I stood there and waited for the executioner to come from behind the curtain. Or was the world going to end right there? Or, was the band director going to suddenly appear and say with a snarl, “I knew you’d be a disappointment. You can’t even hold on to a couple of little pink slips.” I got a little dizzy. And then, the lady at the desk said . . . . . she looked straight at me and uttered the words . . . .
“Oh, that’s fine. We don’t really need them.”
Wait. What?
I just nearly had a stroke at age 17, and you are saying that it’s going to be fine?
Mrs. Registration Lady smiled and took my papers, stamped this and stapled that. She handed them back to me and said, “There you go! All set! . . . . Next!”
Do you mean I sweated all that sweat, got all red in the face, and drummed up all those extra heartbeats for nothing?? Yep. Pretty much!
If I’ve learned one thing in the 46 years since I was a college freshman, it’s that stuff I worry about doesn’t usually turn out to be as big of a deal as I make it out to be. Things are fixable, for the most part. Not always, and I don’t mean to minimize serious stuff. But it’s been my experience that I worry about things way more than I need to.
I can’t say it any better than Jesus Himself said in the book of Matthew 6:25-27:
“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 than food, and the body more 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?”
There’s more to this paragraph as well. Go check it out! It’s so good!
Friend, if you are a worrier, I pray you’ll close your eyes, take a deep breath, and give yourself permission not to worry. Do what you need to do, and then let God take care of it. He’s got things figured out so much better than us! And He never loses.
Written with love – – Patti XOXO
“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
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