I decided I’m still not ready to enter cell-phone life so I turned in my Verizon cell phone earlier this week, just making their 30-day no-risk cutoff before I would be locked into a two-year contract.

So get this, I called Comcast to get their special phone and high-speed internet package and was told I needed a phone before I could set up an appointment! They said they required a number they could reach me before anyone would come out to my residence for a hook-up!

This forced me to buy a $60 Tracfone (when you include the necessary “units” card) from Walgreen’s yesterday and I’m now sitting at Starbucks once again, using the internet.

Not even five minutes ago, I overheard a seemingly discontent middle-aged woman at the next table say to her male companion, “So, what’s worse—this or when I was going nuts?”

What a line?! My immediate guess was that she had probably recently gotten on some sort of anti-depressant. I found her question both amusing and something I could well identify with as someone who was so physically nervous, anxious and depressed a year-and-a-half ago that I briefly tried two different anti-depressants—Paxil and Zoloft—but dropped them because they didn’t seem to do anything but make me tired all the time.

I still struggle with the same ailments and sometimes I think I’m just going to explode from the nerves. I don’t have health insurance to go see a specialist but a nurse I confided in just the other week at a Bible conference here told me it sounded like maybe I was going through early menopause.

I do know that depression and nervous problems have been a part of my life on and off since I was eight years old (this is, in fact, a part of my testimony about being saved as a young child) and run through my family tree on both sides, so it tells me some of this must be hereditary.

My sister, for example, has had more than a dozen nervous collapses that have landed her in the hospital, sometimes for weeks at a time. She’s been on various anti-depressants since her mid-20s.

My aunt told me shortly after my dad died in 2001 that he had a nervous breakdown when he was in his 20s and interning at a hospital (just before he went on to serve as a surgeon for the Air Force in Fairbanks, Alaska during the Korean War).

My great-aunt on my mom’s side once had a nervous breakdown where she threw her antique cello out the second-floor window of her Philadelphia brownstone. The reason this aspect of the story is so memorable is because my mom had been made to take cello lessons when she was a kid with the promise that her aunt would one day give her the expensive old cello. After it was busted up on the sidewalk, my mom immediately stopped carting back and forth to school the cello she was renting from the school’s music department and her lessons ended.

*****

So, now having confessed all this, here’s a passage from a Jordan sermon that helped me just this morning when I was feeling especially “on edge”:

“Paul says, ‘But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.’ Notice he didn’t say God’s going to supply all of your wants? The New English Bible says that—they made a mistake when they translated that.

“He doesn’t say God’s going to supply all of your greeds. People, do you realize most of things we want and desire strongly we can do without? Did you know you can do without health, wealth, education, social standing? You know Paul did all that.

“He says in I Cor. 4:9, ‘We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. You reckon that’s a pretty good social standing? Not much is it? He says, ‘We are fools for Christ’s sake.’ The world didn’t think he had much education. They thought he was a nut. One guy said to him, ‘You’re mad; you’re a crazy man.’

“Paul says (to the Corinthians), ‘You’re honorable but we’re despised. We’re weak but you’re strong. Even in this present hour we hunger and thirst.’ Paul says, ‘I warn you that this is a lot you can face.’

“If the modern health and wealth preachers are right, Paul must have been one of the most wicked men who ever lived because he’s a guy who says, ‘I’m hungry right now. I don’t have enough to eat. I’m thirsty. I’m naked. I haven’t got clothes to wear.’

“He didn’t open up a closet and say, ‘I can’t figure out what to wear today.’ He said, ‘I don’t have it to wear.’ He says, ‘Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwellingplace.’ And yet he says, ‘I labor with my hands.’

“Now, there’s a guy working and still can’t make it! You ever had that problem? Hey, that’s a pretty good guy to be your example today. Is for me! You know something, this idea about health and wealth you hear preached all the time on the tube—let’s be honest; you can get by in your life without being healthy.

“Go to the bookstore and get the book by Joni Eareckson Tada and read about her story. You want to see the victory of God’s grace and His power being made perfect in weakness—read something like that.

“You’ll see victory that few of us who are whole physically ever enjoy. You don’t need wealth. Oh, we like it. We want those things. You know what you need—you need salvation, assurance, comfort, wisdom.

“Paul says, ‘Be careful for nothing. Don’t worry about things.’ That word ‘careful’ there has the idea of anxiety and worry and fretting. Let me give you a quick illustration of that carefulness.

“In Luke 10:38, Martha’s complaining. She’s worrying, she’s overwrought, she’s weighted down with all this serving and she gets distraught. And now she’s all in a dither about it.

“Jesus answered and said unto her, ‘Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.’ But one thing is needful and Mary has chosen that good part. Rather than being in all this fuss and fuming about having the house all straightened up, and the meal just right, and the roast cooked just right, and the gravy just right, and the potatoes just right, and everything just so, He says, ‘You know Mary’s doing the better thing sitting here getting the word.’

“Paul says, ‘Don’t be that way. Don’t be all caught up.’ You know how you get that way? Pride.

“Worry is totally inappropriate in the life of a Believer. Why? Romans 8:24 says, ‘For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?’

“We have a day coming where God is going to declare us before the whole universe as His adult sons. Paul says, ‘You look around you and see all this undeserved suffering, and you see your participation with it, and you’re saved from being dragged down into the earthy by this hope.’

“You have a realm of doctrinal understanding that tells you that what’s going on out here—what I see isn’t what’s lasting—and I look with the eye of faith at the thing that’s going to come, and the sufferings of this present world aren’t worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.

“So we’re not anxious; we’re not full of care when the circumstances around us seem like we ought to just go to pieces. Isn’t that wonderful stability? That stability comes from sound doctrine and an understanding of what God’s doing today and your part in it. You operate in the realm of the reality of who you are in Christ.

“It’s inappropriate to have all the problems of life loom up and cut out the sunlight of the Book—the light from the Word of God. ‘Be careful for nothing.’ Now, does that mean you’re not concerned about it? No. It doesn’t mean you’re flippant; it just means you’re not going to worry about it. You’re not going to be anxious about it. You’re not going to be troubled and brought to the place of inactivity through it as Martha was, just throwing up her hands and yelling ‘Aghhhhhh!’ ”