Sufficient Unto the Day.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.

YOU DO NOT NEED to be a theologian to have an innate understanding of Jesus' admonition to, "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Sufficient unto the day is its own troubles." While I have heard a few people assert that this was an admonition against any kind of planning, I find this incredible. Jesus obviously was in favor of some sort of planning, having deliberately made his way to Jerusalem, and placed Himself in situations where He would encounter His chosen followers.

I think that to understand His saying, all you need is to have had the experience of standing there with your mouth hanging open, gawking at some impossibly difficult and complicated task--organizing the garage, writing a dissertation, training for a triathlon--and feeling too overwhelmed at the magnitude of it to even take one constructive step. That frozen sense of despair, that is the "worry" piece that I believe Jesus longs to replace with His peace.

One coaching technique, the simplistic-seeming advice (just do something, even for 10 minutes) often is dismissed. "What is 10 minutes going to do?" a client argues. "You can't imagine the garage! It's packed--top to bottom!" Well, I have seen those garages. Can a person just set up three cartons and label them: junk, donate, keep? That is day one. Tomorrow, spend 10 minutes picking up items and putting them into one of those three cartons--and then, well, put out the trash; drop off the give-aways, and tape up the "keep" box and set it aside. Filling those three cartons might take two weeks of 10-minute per day efforts. So? You have gotten rid of two boxes worth of stuff and set aside one to keep and organize later, when there is significantly less to manage.

It is the same with the rest. People panic over the dissertation, or even much shorter writing projects. I have been teaching graduate students for more than 10 years, and I can tell you that even with all the years of education they have had, they almost uniformly want to take on too big of a challenge in one project. Ask them to explore a single dilemma in terms of conflicts between laws and codes of ethics that might arise in their future profession and, without fail, a few will attempt to tackle three problems, drift off into historical reflections, and never actually do the assignment as designed. Overwhelmed and discouraged, they want to give up; the problem is that they are trying to do too much. Just do the one thing.

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