When worry is good

I was always taught that worry is bad. Especially we, as Christians, are admonished to put all of our worries on the Lord.

Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you. 1 Peter 5:7 NLT

As a matter of fact, it is considered a form of unbelief. And doctors warn us that worrying can cause physical problems,too. This article, "How Worrying Affects the Body", at WebMD, lists the bad effects of worry on your body and mind. And who am I to argue with these knowledgeable sources? I'm going to argue that there are places for worry. I say that not only is it impossible to have a worry free life, but that you need to worry (sometimes) and some people need to worry more! Have I turned to the Dark Side? No. When I say that it is OK to worry, I mean it is OK to worry sometimes and

Worry is only useful when you can do something about it.

I agree that it makes no sense to worry about things you cannot change. I agree that excessive worry drains your spirit and shows a lack of faith in God. The worry I am talking about that is useful is when, for instance, an engineer worries that someone may run a motor with no load and the motor could blow itself apart. I think this is good and useful worry. I also think this kind of worry must be done more. Too many times people make shoddy equipment. Stuff gets made that no one worried about. I'm mostly talking about how engineers go about their job but how about the butcher who doesn't worry about keep his knife sharp and how he is cutting and whether he has nicked the intestine leaking bacteria into the meat? What if he doesn't worry about people getting sick from this? When I write a program, I have to worry about the people using it and what they might be thinking. Have I made the instructions clear enough? Does the program work the way people would expect? One of the nice things about writing software for a living is that it is easy to put double checks and back-up plans into effect. It is a lot harder when it takes months to build a ship and you can't redesign it at the last minute.

I sometimes think that my watching The Twilight Zone when I was younger was a great preparation for being an engineer. It opened my mind to all the possibilities (both reasonable and unreasonable) of a situation. What if the book you are translating isn't a way to help mankind but instead is a cookbook? What if you finally get enough time to read and then break your glasses? What if you think you landed on an asteroid only to find you landed back on Earth? You have to worry about the possible uses and abuses of your product while you can still make changes.

It is important to worry about what you are doing and it is important to worry early and often - about the things you can change. And then, when you are done, it is time to stop worrying.