“Just pray and walk away.” That’s what I read on a spray bottle that was sitting on the side of my bathtub the other day. I was praying, as I often do, while I took a bath, and I was trying not to worry. My parents had been dealing with Covid, and my mom had been having a hard time getting a deep breath. So I recalled some scriptures that would buoy my faith. And that’s when I saw it: God’s message to me on a plastic label. The thing was, there was nothing spiritual about that spray bottle, but it was turned a little bit to the left so that one letter of the caption was unseen. It was supposed to say, “just spray and walk away“; just a daily shower cleaner that was designed to prevent mildew. But this morning, it was used for something sacred; it was God’s tablet. When I saw the message, at first it took me by surprise. It was just what I needed. And then when I spotted the missing “s”, it made me laugh.
I don’t know if you have had this experience: When something is going on in your life that concerns you, you pray about it, just like every Christian ought to do, but then you conveniently hold on to the concern so that you can make sure and worry about it some more later. It’s like dropping your dry cleaning off and then carrying it home in your car. It’s like taking your child to her grandparents’ house so that you can have a date with your husband and then buckling her up again in her car seat to join you for a movie and a fancy dinner. It’s like bringing all your financial information to your accountant and then staying around to help file your taxes. You get the idea. So I have to admit, I do this sometimes. I don’t really mean to. I know that we are supposed to pray continually, but we’re definitely not supposed to worry continually. The Bible teaches us to cast our cares upon the Lord, not to hold one corner of them while we let Jesus hold the other side. Cast our cares; get rid of them; wash our hands of them (1 Peter 5:7).
I knew that morning that’s what I needed to do with my concerns. Just pray and walk away. So that’s my goal now. And thanks to God’s ability to use everything in my path to get the message across to me (including household cleaners), I have a handy little slogan to remind me.
By: Cynthia Butler
