Pastor Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church says people waste a lot of their time worrying about things that haven't even happened, and wonder "what if" things do not work out the way they hoped.
Osteen shares on his blog that he used to be one of those big worriers, too. Years ago, the city where he and his wife Victoria lived was planning to create speed humps to avoid accidents in residential areas resulting from motorists driving their vehicles too fast.
"A couple of other streets in the subdivision already had speed humps. I noticed that the city put up a sign to notify drivers. It was a big yellow permanent sign, like a Stop sign that said, 'Speed Humps Up Ahead,'" he says.
Everything was going according to plan, but one day Osteen realised that the ugly sign would be placed in front of his house. "Suddenly, I was no longer a fan of those speed humps," he recalls. "I did not want that big ugly sign in front of our house. I went to the other houses where the signs were and measured the distance from the corner. I got the exact length. Sure enough, that sign was going to be right by our driveway in the front of our house."
Osteen spent several months worrying about that sign and how it's going to destroy his house's look. He then came up with the idea of planting a big bush where the sign was going to be placed so as to block it from their point of view.
"About two years later, the city finally came and put the speed humps on the street. But instead of installing the sign in front of my house like the others, they put it four houses down on the other side of the street. I spent two years trying to fix a problem that never even happened. Every time I drove up to my house I thought, 'There's my worry tree,'" he says.
Osteen learned a valuable lesson then, and it is something he is now sharing with others. The pastor says people should not worry about tomorrow because "tomorrow will have enough worries of its own."
Instead, Osteen suggests people live in today, enjoy the blessings of today, love people today, and let go of the need to worry about things that haven't happened yet.
