Following on from yesterday, here are more suggestions about dealing with the worrier and tips how you can best help them.
If you are a believer, pray for them. You don’t need to know exactly what the worries are to be able to pray for peace and settling.
Better still if they are agreeable, is pray with them about their worrying. Again you don’t need to know what the worries are, unless they want to tell you. God knows. That’s all that matters. So encourage them to share if they want to but don’t hassle them if they don’t. Sometimes and for various reasons the person doesn’t want to admit what the worries are. Even if they don’t want to pray with you at the time, you can quietly go off and pray for them.
The other night I ended up doing two things when I was worrying. The first was to pray about the worries consuming me and admit they were unfounded. As I prayed it through I began to see that even if the worst in the situation happened, it still wouldn’t be the end of the world. Since it was a chilly evening, I prayed while I lay in bed.
When it became obvious I still wasn’t sleeping, I got up, rugged up and read a book. I just needed to take my mind off those things and focus on something else. Mick was peacefully sleeping. I know if I had woken him up, he would have held me and tried to comfort me or get to the root cause of the worry. I also knew in this case it wasn’t anything I should be worrying about, so there was no point waking him up. I was better to deal with it on my own. If it had been a genuine concern like the illness of a loved one, or financial difficult or anything major, then I would have been only too happy too talk it through and pray with him about it.
Rather like when a child is behaving badly and sometimes distraction can be the answer, helping the worrier become involved in another activity or sharing relaxing together time can take the worrier’s mind off things and help them.
Most importantly don’t complain to others about your worrying spouse, but respect their privacy.
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