An Encouraging Word – Useless worry

Father J. Ronald Knott
Father J. Ronald Knott

Do not worry about tomorrow. Matthew 6:33

Poor Advent! In a culture where delayed gratification is practically extinct, Advent doesn’t have a chance. Advent is already half-over, Christmas music is beginning to wear thin and we are still 10 days before the official start of the Christmas season.

The whole point of Advent is to teach us patience. The very word “patience” comes from the Latin word “to suffer” and today we try to avoid any suffering at all costs. Patience is not simply the ability to wait, it’s also about how to act while you are waiting.

I recently had a travel experience that again revealed to me how far I need to go when it comes to learning patience. What I did while I waited amounted to nothing in the long run, but bring unnecessary self-inflicted emotional pain.

I was flying home from Ottawa, Canada, after leading a week-long retreat for the priests of the Diocese of Pembroke. I was exhausted and looking forward to getting home. What was supposed to be an easy, one-connection, six-hour trip home, turned into an aggravating, 12-hour, touch and go, nerve-wracking, comedy of errors.

It involved at least 10 delays, three ticket changes, a snow storm, a de-icing truck getting stuck to the plane, three gates unavailable because other planes were blocking them, racing through three terminals in the Chicago airport with a backpack on my back, arriving at the gate after the door had been closed, eventually being the last to board, but finally making it home bodily exhausted and nerves stressed to the point of breaking.

What I learned is this: Even though I eventually got home that night, I didn’t have much patience and I did not act well while I waited for things to unfold.

I fretted, paced, complained, stared at the monitor, looked at the runway, worried incessantly and aggravated the agent behind the desk with unanswerable questions — none of which did a thing to move things along or change the reality of the situation I was in.

The second thing I learned is this: The fact that things seemed hopeless did not actually mean they were hopeless. Five hundred years ago, philosopher Michel de Montaigne said, “My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.” According to the Huffington Post, 85 percent of the things we worry about never happen.

The third thing I learned is: A flight delay is not a problem, just an aggravation. A plane crash is a problem. Even if I were stranded in Ottawa for the night, it would still be just an aggravation. I keep trying to remind myself that crashing on time is a lot worse than being delayed.

It occurred to me that spoiled people tend to “awfulize” situations that are merely bumps in the road. Losing a child to drugs is a problem. Plane delays are mere inconveniences.

To read more from
Father Knott, visit his blog: FatherKnott.com.

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