When it came to worrying, my aunt was an expert. I recall the time we were talking on the phone about her son coming to visit her. 

“I’m worried about him driving alone,” my aunt said. 

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” I replied. 

But this did not stop her from positing a list of potential disasters that could unfold on the interstate. The son in question was in his sixties with two grown children of his own, but in my aunt’s eyes, he was still a little fellow running around the house in pajamas with footies. 

My aunt also fretted over her daughter, her grandchildren and great grandchildren—and yours truly. For example, when I was visiting her in Florida, she asked me to fetch a blanket from her bedroom closet. 

As I left the room to do so, she called out, “Be careful! Don’t pinch your fingers in the door.” At that moment, I was 3 years old again, hauling around my favorite stuffed dog.  

Truth be told, I inherited the worry gene myself. When I took my niece, the capable mom of three children, to the airport, I advised her: “Now don’t get lost!”  

For years, I had a worry tucked away in the back of my mind about the devastating loneliness I would endure, should my husband die before me, and in fact, he did. From that tragedy, I learned that sometimes our worst nightmares do come true, but God’s grace will guide us through them. 

I do not have offspring but commiserate with friends whose kids are struggling at school or acting up at home. Like my friends, I sometimes identify with Martha, the quintessential worrywart in the Gospels, who rushes around readying the house for her guest, who is none other than Jesus. 

She goes to Jesus and complains her sister isn’t helping, and he chides her gently, “Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.” 

She might have been surprised when he said her sister, Mary, had “chosen the better part.” After all, Mary was not engrossed in practical matters, but was sitting quietly with Jesus, listening to him.  

It is so easy to become “anxious and worried” when our daily lives are filled with overlapping trials, tribulations and temptations. I find solace in the words of Caryll Houselander, a 20th-century English Catholic mystic and author, who lived through the bombings in London during World War II.  

She wrote: “I was terrified, but I was also perfectly conscious of being held in God’s hands … and there was nothing more to worry about.”  

In a letter, a friend asked Houselander how to stop worrying, and she replied, “The more you say, ‘I must not worry,’ the more you will: I think it is better simply to offer the worrying to God.” 

We can ask God to transform our fretting into a prayer. Just as Jesus offered his suffering on the cross for the redemption of the world, we can give God our mental anguish to help others. 

On the cross, Jesus said, “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Like him, we can pray, “God, into thy hands I place my friend, my child, my spouse, my neighbor.” 

These are big, loving hands, which shaped the skies, the seas and the stars. Hands that healed the lepers and the blind. Hands that are steering the ship of our lives.  

We can place in these capable hands our worries about our loved ones driving on the highway, getting frazzled when guests arrive and getting their fingers caught in the closet door.