Hi, I’m Abbie Halberstadt. Mama to 5 littles, 8 and under. Jesus lover. Husband adorer. Fitness instructor. DIY and thrifting addict. I blog about that and lots more at M is for Mama. 
A few days ago, my 3 little girls and I were finishing up 2 hours of errands feeling hot, sticky, and hangry.
I loaded everybody in the van, then climb in the front to discover…no keys. Even though I’d just used them to open the car.
I rifled through my purse. I looked on the floorboards. I dug through smeary car seats.
10 minutes passed, and still no keys.
A knot formed in the pit of my stomach, a lump of panic that I would be stuck in a public parking lot with a van full of screaming toddlers and no way to ever get home.
Rational? Hardly. But not being able to find something that I just know should be in plain sight does strange things to my logic.
10 more keyless minutes passed. During this entire process, I sputtered fragmented prayers: “Lord, could you please just help me…I just need to find them…Father, please.”
Now, I don’t have a hard life. Compared to a huge percentage of the world’s population, I am a queen living in a mansion surrounded by worldly treasures. I wouldn’t qualify as such by Western standards, but I still have to search long and hard to find anything worth complaining about.
And yet. Those lost keys were causing me anxiety, y’all.
Finally, I called my husband, and he prayed on the phone for me, ending with the words, “Jesus, we just ask that you help us find these keys as soon as possible.”
After the “amen,” I picked through a pile of items for the third time, glancing, this time, inside a makeup pouch that was almost half-shut and in which my keys had no business being.
And yet, there they were.
As I drove home, a refrain from a childhood song played on repeat in my head: “I cast all my cares upon you. I lay all of my burdens down at your feet. And any time I don’t know what to do, I will cast all my cares upon you.”
Maybe you’re like me right now, and your most common source of anxiety comes from lost keys, a toddler meltdown in public, or a diaper blowout when you just used your last one. Maybe you’re not like me at all, and you have considerably more legit worries like a crumbling marriage or a debilitating illness or longstanding unemployment. Maybe God won’t reveal your “lost keys” within two seconds of your latest prayer. But this much I can tell you: anything that drives us to Him is worth it. Because He longs for us to heave our burdens, whether mundane or soul-crushing, onto His divine shoulders so that we can realize we were never meant to carry them in the first place.
The key (see how I did that?) to unlocking anxiety is to give it to The One who watches over the sparrows and clothes the grass of the field. He won’t forget or ignore or belittle. Why? Because He cares for you.
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