Worry.

An excerpt from my book, After The Rooster Crows

Matthew 6:34
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

After the heatwave at LambJam '95, our team started praying daily for good weather for LambJam '96. Weather can make or break a festival. We rarely sold enough advance tickets to meet our budget, so we were reliant on good sales at the gate. Rain in the forecast meant less ticket sales and could mean the difference between losing money or showing a profit.

About a week before LambJam '96 I was watching the Weather Channel one night and I heard the meteorologists talking about a tropical storm brewing near the Leeward Islands. A couple of possible tracks put it moving past Florida, and potentially up the East Coast. I got a knot in my stomach.

I'd watched enough of these storms that my fear exceeded my faith, and as we put the finishing touches on our festival any excitement I had was tempered with concern. As it turned out, my fears were justified as the eye of Hurricane Bertha would pass directly over us on the Friday night of LambJam.

We opened the festival on Wednesday with good weather and an enthusiastic team of volunteers. Artists including Geoff Moore & The Distance, Clay Cross, Patty Cabrera, Anointed, and Kathy Troccoli were scheduled to appear throughout the four-day event. Thousands of tickets were sold, the campground was sold out, food vendors had their tents up and were cooking, and Christian music fans were staking out their section of grass in front of the big stage. Everybody was excited, but I was obsessively watching the track of Bertha. By this time, Bertha had achieved major hurricane status as a Category 3 storm, and on Thursday we knew it was going to make landfall south of us in the Outer Banks and move over Milton, DE overnight Friday.

Thursday night, after a very long day of managing the festival and trying to formulate a hurricane plan with my team, I went to bed to try and get a few hours of sleep. But I couldn't fall asleep. Our home was on the same property as the campground, so I could smell the last of the campfires burning at sites a few hundred feet away, and I prayed.

Actually, it was more like complaining.

“Lord, I prayed every single day for the past year for good weather, and we're going to get a hurricane? Seriously, why would you let this happen? I am going to lose my shirt, and I am doing this for You, not to make money. Are you even listening?”

This went on for a while as I ran through a mental checklist of things that I knew I would have to do in the morning. Things like announcing we were shutting down and canceling Friday's event; Ask everyone to evacuate the campground and take down their tents; Lower the main stage and tarp whatever lights and sound gear we couldn't take down; Give the vendors the bad news that they were going to be stuck with lots of food and merchandise; Figure out if and how we were going to refund Friday ticket holders; Call the bands that were en route and tell them to go back home; Ask the artists on-site if they wanted to hunker down with us or leave ahead of the hurricane. The list was endless and excruciating.

Bertha was moving fairly quickly, and I wondered if we would be able to salvage at least part of our late-day Saturday schedule since I was obligated to pay the artists that were booked. Maybe I could reduce the amount of money I was about to lose. But how much damage would be done to the campground and our stage?

The questions swirled and I asked God why He was letting this happen.

Then a thought popped into my head. It was in the form of a question from God, and in the next few seconds, this dialogue played out in my exhausted brain. And it has changed my thoughts about worrying.

God: “What's the worst thing that could happen to you?”

Me: “I would die and spend eternity in Hell.”

God: “Do you worry about that?”

Me: “No.”

God: “Why not?”

Me: “Because you promised anyone that asks will be saved, and I did.”

God: “So if you don't worry about the worst thing in the world happening to you, why do you worry about these little things?”

Me: (crickets)

I fell asleep soon afterwards, knowing the hurricane wasn't going to change its course, and that I would have to evacuate the festival grounds, and it was going to be a bad day. But now I had full peace that God wasn't surprised by any of this, and I shouldn't waste my energy worrying about what would or could happen.

I wasn’t worried about the worst thing, why should I worry about little things?