Close the Worry Loop

If you struggle with worry, you’re not alone. Laurie Davies helps us close the “worry loop."

Elisa

Close the Worry Loop

By Laurie Davies

It’s a good thing armadillos can’t see, because my pants were at my ankles.

It all started at a campsite earlier that night when, against my better judgment, I slurped a late-night cup of hot cocoa. Now it was 3:00 a.m., duty called, and I had three choices. Hold it until morning, go in the woods, or walk to the campground bathrooms.

I breathed a deep sigh, pulled on my hiking boots, and unzipped the tent. Brilliant moonlight—so bright that I left my flashlight behind—lit the road to the camp latrine. No sooner had I settled into the first stall than I heard the hideous sound of claws click-clacking toward me. A fleshy pink nose poked under the metal partition. An armadillo’s tiny, beady eyes and long, dirty nails followed. My scream elevated the area to DEFCON 3.

I froze.

It froze.

I would have reached to grab something to defend myself, like the FLASHLIGHT I LEFT IN THE TENT, but instead my mind raced with worry. Would movement to climb atop the toilet tempt those grotesque claws to react? When was my last tetanus shot? Don’t armadillos carry leprosy? Is a bathroom stall where it ends?

I got my pants belted around my waist—so at least now if I died, I would be decent—and I made it out of the bathroom just fine.

And don’t we usually make it out just fine?

The things we worry about either:

a) don’t happen

b) happen and are not too bad

c) happen and are as bad as we feared

The stats are significant. Psychology Today reports on a group of pervasive worriers who reported “testable” worries (those that could be measured) at regular intervals each day for ten days. The results? “A whopping 91 percent of worries were false alarms.

I don’t like what worry does to my heart. Our English word worry comes from the German wurgen, which means to strangle. Worry strangles me. After thirty years of believing in Jesus, I worry more than I’d like to admit. This has never changed an outcome.

Leonard Nasca is the clinical supervisor for the volunteer-staffed lay counseling program I serve on at my suburban Phoenix church. He offers this clarifying view on worry: “We often use the word ‘worry’ as if it’s interchangeable with ‘comprehending’ or ‘understanding.’ We think worry means ‘keep thinking about it until I resolve everything.’ It doesn’t. Worry is just an umbrella term for an unresolved issue.”

In other words, worry equals loose ends. I would like my loose ends all tied up, thank you. No relationship tension, health uncertainty, or money shortfalls. I feel less fragile that way. I face fewer messy questions about God that way. But a worry-free life would lead me to walk by sight and not by faith. It would invite spiritual anemia. I would lose the white-knuckle wonder of what it means to follow God.

Rather than longing for a life without worry, I want to learn to close the worry loop.

The worst part about my armadillo encounter was that I never even went to the bathroom. I held it until dawn because a pack of imaginary armadillos was outside my tent ready to pounce. Worry kept me up all night.

If you have trusted Jesus for a while and yet worry still plagues you, let’s identify the key ingredients linked to trust. Consider the words the Lord spoke through the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah:

But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence. They are like trees planted along a riverbank . . . not worried by long months of drought. (Jeremiah 17:7–8 NLT)

Now, read the passage again, this time considering that Jeremiah’s entire ministry was spent in drought. For decades, he called out the sin of God’s people with no real success.

In today’s language, Jeremiah was an influencer with no followers—a prophet who posted on social media for forty years without any likes, shares, or tags. He was routinely rejected, yet rooted in God.

One of my favorite views in Arizona overlooks khaki earth that’s dotted with scrubby desert bushes. It’s the kind of scene where you expect Roadrunner to zoom under an acme anvil hoisted onto a cliff by Wile E. Coyote. Before you think twenty-five years of desert living has skewed my view of beauty, there’s a reason I love this overlook. A long, shimmering row of cottonwood trees ribbon their way through the landscape. Their roots run deep along a well-supplied river. When we trust in the Lord, we are that vibrant splash of cottonwoods.

Our relationships or finances or other problems may seem tangled like tumbleweed. Drought may drain color from the landscape of our lives. Yet, we flourish in adversity. Why? Because we’re rooted. How? Because we have “made” the Lord our hope and confidence. There is choice here. It’s a conscious thing. Instead of making our worries bigger than the Lord, we “make” the Lord bigger than our worries.

Like me, you’ve no doubt tried standing on unstable foundations. The energy this requires is exhausting. The threat of collapse always looms. When we shift the weight of our worry onto him, we discover he is strong enough to hold it. He is the only One strong enough to hold it.

Adapted from Emotional Hoarding: Letting Go of the Stuff that Keeps You Stuck by Laurie Davies. (© 2026). Published by Moody Publishers. Used with permission.

A former journalist and women’s ministry director, Laurie Davies knows the burdens that weigh women down. As an author, speaker, and lay counselor, she encourages women to trade their “emotional hoards” for freedom. She is the author of Emotional Hoarding: Letting Go of the Stuff that Keeps You Stuck. Laurie lives in Mesa, Arizona, with her husband of 30 years, Greg. Their adult son, Morgan, lives nearby. Connect with Laurie at lauriedavies.com