TAKE NO THOUGHT

Wikimedia Commons

Portrait of Howard Thurman

Howard University Chapel

Thanks to Helen for providing the quotation from Howard Thurman which led to this post.

The following is from Howard Thurman’s book Meditations of the Heart, published originally in 1953 but also copyrighted in 1981. 

Helen and I think is very good and speaks to these times. It comes from the section of the book called Life is Alive and is entitled:

Take no thought for your life

“Take no thought. This day I shall desert my anxieties. I shall forsake them—cut them off from the food supply of my spirit. Confident am I that if I do not feed them they cannot long survive. I shall seek to limit my primary exposure to those who exploit my anxieties by their tendency to exaggeration and alarm. I shall seek to broaden my exposure to those whose lives give forth confidence and calmness. Into God’s hand do I yield myself this day, with all that it involves for me, with the faith that I can take complete refuge in the knowledge and the love of God. For me this will not be easy, nor do I lightly undertake it.

Take no thought for your life. What a strange thing it is, this injunction! Up to this period of my life, I have seemed to survive by taking thought for my life. Upon deeper reflection, I begin to see that my life is not now, nor has it ever been, my own. I did not create nor have I sustained my life through the years. In so many ways, without my own plans and purposes, hard places have been made soft and rough places smooth. It is a source of immeasurable satisfaction and comfort to me to know that God, who is the Source and Sustainer of life, can be trusted to see me all the way to the end and beyond. Take no thought for your life—it is in God’s hands and ever, when I am obeying the laws of life, it is God who works through me.

Take no thought for your life.”

This meditation is based on Matthew 6 which reads in the Phillips Translation:

6:25-30 - "That is why I say to you, don't worry about living - wondering what you are going to eat or drink, or what you are going to wear. Surely life is more important than food, and the body more important than the clothes you wear. Look at the birds in the sky. They never sow nor reap nor store away in barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you much more valuable to him than they are? Can any of you, however much he worries, make himself an inch taller? And why do you worry about clothes? Consider how the wild flowers grow. They neither work nor weave, but I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed like one of these! Now if God so clothes the flowers of the field, which are alive today and burnt in the stove tomorrow, is he not much more likely to clothe you, you 'little-faiths'?

6:31-33 - "So don't worry and don't keep saying, 'What shall we eat, what shall we drink or what shall we wear?! That is what pagans are always looking for; your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Set your heart on the kingdom and his goodness, and all these things will come to you as a matter of course.

6:34 - "Don't worry at all then about tomorrow. Tomorrow can take care of itself! One day's trouble is enough for one day."

The Fall-Winter 2009 issue of Quaker Theology contains an article entitled Howard Thurman and Quakers by Stephen W. Angell.