Casting and Caring

                 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. (I Peter 5:7)

            “Here. And here. Oh, and here’s another one. Catch!” That’s one idea of casting: throwing. Another variation is casting one’s line when fishing, throwing the bait some distance. The point is that casting isn’t tame or particularly gentle. It’s putting things into God’s hands with a force or at a distance that doesn’t make taking them back easy, or possibly throwing the anxiety toward God in hopes that it will lure Him in.

            The next word changes the fishing image for me. Instead of putting my sources of anxiety on a line and toss it toward where I think God is, it’s more like chumming, or throwing lots of blood, gore, or anxieties into the “water” and luring God in like one would a shark. It’s not just one bit of anxiety, it’s all of them, all at once and we don’t bother trying to make them look pretty. I know, that doesn’t sound respectful toward God, but that’s some of the imagery that comes to mind from the first two words.

The other point that all brings to mind is that there is nothing too big, too little, too important, too trivial, too old, too repeated, or too anything-else to be excluded. There are times when I wonder if God is not answering a request because I haven’t made it seem important or “big” enough. If I could perform a bad Shakespearean or operatic scene (without feeling like a complete idiot), maybe God would consider it an “effective” prayer, even if it was only an affective prayer. But we’re not told to cast those things about which we can be dramatic on Him. We’re told to cast all.

Once we do, then what? Then we remind ourselves that He cares for us. Every now and again, people share memes on social media about expressing our concern for others not by riding in like knights on white horses to fix the problem or like well-meaning but caustic old aunts who lecture and scold, but by just being there. When it comes to God and prayer, we tend to change our minds. God isn’t allowed to just stand there. We expect Him to do something and doing nothing is not doing something. At the very least,  we’d like a note telling us that God’s prescription is to do nothing. It’s so hard to wait and hope that He’ll perform some miracle, only to discover He had other plans six days, weeks, or months later.

Waiting is, however, not really God’s plan even though we tend to think so. Even when He doesn’t fix things, He’s doing what those meme-sharers seem to think is so crucial. He’s being with us. He’s caring. He’s not fixing, because fixing isn’t always caring. Sometimes we fix things so we don’t have to take time or put forth the effort to care. “Here. All better. Now go away.” That’s now how God works.