July 26, 2026
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Greetings From...Adventure
One of the major highlights of my six-week renewal leave was that my family and I got to spend two weeks in the UK. Part of this was connecting with the researcher at the University of Durham who I told you about last week, and a big part of it was just exploring and having an adventure together.
I LOVE an adventure. And I really love an adventure when it’s well-planned. So Zack and I spent MONTHS meticulously planning this trip. Our itinerary was to spend about 9 days in England, and then end the trip in Paris. We used an app that let us not only list what we wanted to do, but it mapped everything for us, I think I saved about 75 Instagram reels about both London and Paris, and we were ready for a really awesome time away.
And I would say that the first 8 days were pretty much perfect. Everything went according to plan. (SLIDES) Cross country trains were on time (I would learn that this is actually a miracle in itself). We learned how to navigate the London transit system. Rhys was walking around in an England bucket hat he bought at a pub...we were living the dream!
And then...at the end of that first week...we started hearing rumblings about a heatwave.
Now, at first, we didn’t think much of this. We live in Indiana, it gets hot and humid, I’ve been to legitimately HOT places like Haiti and the Middle East, during the summer...this was London. I thought this could not possibly be that big of a deal.
Well. I was WRONG about that. It was absolutely a big deal. Because the infrastructure in that part of the world is not made to deal with extreme heat, and this meant that things got very chaotic fast. Rail travel was getting disrupted because of safety concerns. We very quickly learned which Tube lines in London had AC and which ones did NOT, which I can report is a full-sensory experience.
And...we started hearing some distressing things from our next destination. It was uncomfortable in London, but the heat was downright dangerous in Paris. Museums and monuments were closing, there were more warnings about rail travel, and people were being hospitalized or worse due to the effects of the heat.
So a few days before we were supposed to leave, we found ourselves seriously considering canceling the Paris portion of our trip and going north to Scotland instead where instead of 105 degrees, it was about 65.
And I was in a lovely whirlwind of stress as we tried to navigate this decision. I would think about arriving to a densely packed city and having full-sun 105 degree days with little to no AC, and that sounded pretty terrible. Then, I would think about the journey to get there and the very real possibility that our train could break down somewhere in France and my stress level would rise even more.
But then I would consider that I have wanted to go to Paris ever since my three years of high school French. That Avery made me a banner with the Eiffel Tower on it to say goodbye! The fact that Rhys had been doing Duolingo French lessons every morning for months and had been telling everyone he was going to see the Mona Lisa. And that Hazel and I bought matching Croissant PJs for this part of the trip! What about the PJs?!
As Zack and I weighed all these options, it felt impossible to make the “right” decision. And in the midst of my indecision, I quickly defaulted to worry. I’m talkingthe stomach hurting, ominous feeling, all-consuming type of worry.
And do you know what makes it REALLY hard to be present in the moment you’re in? Being that consumed with worry about something that’s going to happen in the future. Because that type of worry tends to make us fixate on things, it gets us really amped up, it causes us to start to scramble to find solutions.
And for ME, when I give in to this type of worry...I very easily forget about anything from God that can sustain me. I feel all the feels, I start researching it to death, I begin to believe it is 150% up to me to figure out whatever needs done.
That’s why the Scripture we read today, these words of Jesus, are so important to remember. Because he is reminding us that this type of scramble and franticness...is no way to build a life. And that if we know God, we have no REASON to build a life on worry like that. In fact, Jesus essentially says that this type of worrying is incredibly unproductive. He asks this simple but powerful question: (SLIDE)
And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life?
Now, there’s a tone I could read this question in, and that tone feels not so great. But I want to encourage us, if we’re reading this scripture and especially this line of it through a lens of judgement...that’s not really where Jesus starts. I think there’s always a lot of compassion and empathy in Jesus’ words and that most of the time he’s just acknowledging that, yes, this is a very basic human experience you might be having, and I want to tell you something about it. And what Jesus does here, is he reminds us that while worry might be a reality, it’s not where we have to stay. That there’s a better way to experience the world.
And this is one of those teachings that we ALL need to hear, because we ALL worry about SOMETHING. And we all have specific things that trigger our worry. That’s normal. It’s part of life.
(SLIDE) When we worry, Jesus reminds us that God can be trusted.
Because we have a God who cares deeply about God’s creation. There’s a reason Jesus references the lilies and the birds and how God is taking care of those things, because it reminds us that God is a responsible and loving Creator. And if God can care for those things...how much more could God care for us? I just always think about that little line in Genesis, where it says, “God created humans and it was VERY GOOD.” Everything else in this creation narrative has beendeemed GOOD, and that’s great, but HUMANS, God is overly delighted with!
When I read these words of Jesus, it’s almost like a reminder back to that theological point. To remember the delight, the love, the care that God has for us, and that we can trust our God BECAUSE of that love and faithfulness.
And I think this is true whether we’re talking about some good adventure, like the stories I am telling you about today, OR when we’re talking about situations that are much more serious. I’m aware that figuring out vacation plans requires a very different level of trust in God’s care than when we’re doing things like making complicated medical decisions or trying to figure out where the next meal will come from or bearing witness to any number of tragic things that happen in our world. But the truth is, they all hit at the same things in us. All of these things can draw us into the worry spiral and away from the steadiness of trusting in what God can do.
Jesus says that no matter what we’re going through—whether it’s big or small, momentary or drawn out—we can trade all-consuming worry for trust. And thistrust that Jesus talks about is more than a passive feeling. It's an active life spent, as he calls it, “desiring the Kingdom of God.”
Now, “Desiring God’s Kingdom” sounds...lofty and kind of abstract at first. That feels like it could mean 500 different things and so we might wonder HOW doing that is going to really help us trade worry for trust?
I think about it like this, and whenever I talk about the Kingdom of God, I use this expression—that is borrowed from someone else, I certainly didn’t come up withit—that the Kingdom of God is: (SLIDE) Now and not yet.
And what that means when we’re talking about desiring the Kingdom of God, we know we are often longing for things that are not going to happen in this world as we know it. We long for a time when we don’t have to worry. When everyone’s needs are met, when things are really, truly GOOD.
But what we also know is that “not yet” is not the whole story. There’s something happening NOW that we can be part of as people who follow Jesus. We can be people who care for the needs around us and seek to create something better. We can be people who let others do the same for us. We can believe and live like we believe that even though life is hard and chaotic that we AREN’T alone, and that maybe God has created us to walk with each other in moments of worry.
As many of you know, we did end up switching our plans from Paris to Scotland. And on the morning we were getting ready to leave London for Scotland, my stress and worry were at the highest level. Even though we were going someplace that was out of the heatwave, it was still going strong in London. We had had to delay our travel by two days because of rail travel warnings and even though they were supposed to expire the day we left, they were extended another day because the heat would just not let up.
Our reservation was for 9:30am and when we got to King’s Cross it was already uncomfortably hot. And it felt like every time I would see a temperature reading posted, it had gone up one degree. It felt like the temperature was this uncontrollable thing going in the wrong direction. So we’re standing at the station, with hundreds of other people, all feeling deeply concerned about this thing none of us can control. Cancelations are starting to pop up on the display boards...it is hot and tense and terrible in this train station.
I could imagine what my face was doing as I took all of this in, and you know, I had a hunch that I probably did not look my most relaxed and refreshed self. And this was quickly confirmed when two station workers saw me. Because they both got these deeply concerned looks, probably thinking, “oh man, we have to deal with this lady and whatever she’s going through.” And they asked me if I was ok, and then handed me a bottle of water. We had just bought 5 liters of water, I was thinking sirs, I do not need your water, I need to know my train will not get stranded!
One of the workers used the water exchange to check in a little bit more and he asked us where we were going. I told him and what time our train was leaving, I’msure still looking frenzied, and he looked at his little device, looked at our family and said, “how would you like to be on an 8:30 train instead? I want you to take the 8:30am train, because we know you’ll be able to get out.”
So I was like, yes, I would like that too! And he proceeded to explain how this would work, that because we didn’t have a seat, and because we would not be the only ones wanting to get on an earlier train, we would have to be very aggressive in getting ourselves to the ONE coach on the train that had first come, first serve seating. This sounded very stressful to all four of us, but he assured us that if we did it exactly how he was explaining, we would be able to get out before the delays and cancellations really started disrupting things.
And he was right. We got in, we got seats, we got to our destination just fine. But I’ll tell you, it was so hard to trust a stranger in a situation we had very littleunderstanding of, in a cultural context that was not familiar to us, during a hazardous weather event. And the worry I felt threatened to keep me in place, to NOT trust this person who was looking out for us. But we were taken care of. In these really concrete, tangible ways. From the water to the advice to the safety of not getting stranded.
And I have to admit that all the worrying I did to get to that point...it didn’t really accomplish much. All the knots I let myself get emotionally tied up in...it didn’tinfluence the outcome. It did take me out of being present with my family several times. It did send my body into full on stress response mode. But did it CHANGE anything? There was still a heat wave. We still had a to make a pretty significant change of plans.
But what DID influence the outcome was relying on others and trusting in the simplicity of taking the next small step in front of us. What DID accomplishsomething was letting myself be present and holding on to the trust that it would be ok and that we weren’t alone. What DID resolve a challenging moment was letting someone look out for us and know that if we had the tools to do that, we would do the same thing for someone else. All of those things working together (and, real talk, getting away from the heat!) helped me shift from worry to trust, from the what-ifs to being present.
And being able to make that shift absolutely influenced the way I experienced the rest of the trip, especially the time in Scotland. I’ll tell you a bit more about this in my Midtown Message devotion on Tuesday but that part of the trip...ended up being one of the most spiritually rich parts of my leave. Completely unexpected! It would have been EASY to miss. And I’m thankful I didn’t. I’m thankful that the worry could be set down and I could seek something better.
That’s a lesson I am really trying to take from this very specific situation and let shape the more everyday parts of my life. Because it’s a pretty common part of my lived experience. Maybe that’s true for you too. And so I just wonder, something for each of us to contemplate:
(SLIDE) What helps you shift from worry to trust?
This isn’t prescriptive, but it’s an important question for each of us to examine. What are the practices, who are the people, that lead us away from all-consuming worry and into the grounding trust of God’s presence?
Maybe it’s as simple as remembering how The Message translation phrases verse 34:
34 “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.