Why worry?

I'm not typically a worrier. I can usually send my kids off down the street on their bikes without me just fine. I might call after them, "Be safe!" or "Keep your eyes open!" but once they're gone I don't really worry...that much. This weekend I spent a lot of time worrying. Not so much about my kids, well, sort of about my kids, but mostly about me.

I have this pesky bone tumor. Well, I had this pesky bone tumor. It was removed last February. The pesky part is that it happens to be the kind of tumor that likes to grow back. Because of that, I travel 300 miles to a big time hospital with big time specialists every four months to have my wrist x-rayed to make sure it isn't coming back. This summer, at my last appointment, I impressed the surgeon so much with my speedy recovery, amazing mobility, and clean x-ray that I figured I was out of the woods, so to speak. My wrist started bothering me a lot this weekend. It freaked me out. I began to worry.

I have heard it said that, "If you worry, why pray? If you pray, why worry?" Which I really believe is true. 95% of what we worry about never ends up happening anyway. Right? Why bother? It seems like wasted energy to me. But I did it anyway. I spent about 24 hours feeling afraid and quite sorry for myself. I suppose that the one good thing that came out of all that worry was a fair amount of gentleness and compassion for myself. We moms spend an enormous amount of time and energy feeling gentleness, sweetness, and love for our children. When was the last time you did that for yourself....really?

So I worried and played the "What if?" game for a whole day, and now I'm done. As my friend says, "There's nothing to worry about until there's something to worry about." Right? I'll be at the doctor tomorrow afternoon. Pray for clean x-rays. But don't worry.