A few years ago, I was gifted a digital picture frame that quickly became a focal point in our home. I loaded the frame with a collection of favorite recent photos and displayed it in a prominent spot where our family could enjoy the ongoing slideshow of memories. This frame has provided us endless enjoyment, and since screen time is kept to a minimum in our home, our frame is especially prized thanks to its status as an acceptable form of digital entertainment.

Until last month, our frame was loaded only with recent pictures. My system for categorizing and storing photos involves creating a new folder for each calendar year, and it was easiest for me to load the frame with pictures from the previous year only. In late February, I randomly discovered that I could create more than one album and that I could set the frame to cycle through photos from ALL of the albums. Talk about a game changer! It took some time, but I created albums for every year going back to 2016 (the first year I began systematically storing my photos), and now our frame is loaded with thousands of pictures from the past eight years.

A lot has happened in our family in those eight years. We added a dog (yay for pictures of puppy Arlo!) and moved to a new town; I gave birth to twins and then to a fourth baby. Now, when a photo of an infant pops up on the frame, it takes some time to determine which of my babies I’m seeing. (Due to the large age gaps with my kids, I hadn’t recognized the similarities until seeing back-to-back pictures of them at similar ages.) This foray into all of our older photos and memories has breathed new life into the digital frame experience that we already loved!

I don’t regret reviving our digital memories. But the experience has brought up some unexpected emotions. As much as I love revisiting the past, I like to do it on my own terms, and until the arrival of old photos in my frame, I rarely looked at older pictures of my kids because this walk down memory lane stirs in me an aching nostalgia for each of my kids’ younger years. In just ten minutes of staring at my frame, I watch Kali and Sully and Charlie and Arlo and even Nico grow before my eyes. I am reminded of how fleeting my time is with them—an undeniable truth that becomes even more impossible to ignore when visions of my kids’ younger selves are flashing before my eyes.

An interesting thing about my nostalgia is that it has somehow morphed from a past-orientation to a future one: I’m not just wistful for my kids’ younger years, but also for their present. I’m sad about how rapidly time is passing, how fleeting their childhoods will be, even while they are still young. It’s as though I’m preemptively grieving the loss of their youth. I know they will be grown and gone before I know it, and some days that thought can leave me absolutely wrecked.*

I don’t think I realized that this might be unusual until a recent conversation with a friend, in which I casually mentioned that I cry almost daily about how how quickly my kids are growing. My friend literally gasped at my statement, and it occurred to me—perhaps for the very first time—that not every mother feels quite this way about the reality of her kids growing up.

My specific brand of nostalgia-twinged anxiety may be unusual or extreme, but I am hardly the first person to experience worry about the past or the future. Scripture is brimming with passages that speak to the problem of anxiety, worry, and fear (Philippians 4:6, Isaiah 41:10, and Colossians 3:15 are a few of my favorites), and Jesus Himself talked quite a bit about laying aside our worries to find peace in Him. The subject is given quite a bit of airtime in His famous Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew:

 “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” – Matthew 6:31-34 (NIV)

Jesus knew of our human tendency to worry about things outside of our control, and He told us NOT TO DO IT. In this passage, He reminds His audience that God provides food for the birds of the sky, and He clothes the fields with splendor. Creation does not need to concern itself with worrying about the future, because God will meet those needs when they arise. And what He does for the birds and the flowers He will do for us; our primary focus needs to be on seeking and glorifying the Lord, and He will care for the rest.

There was a time when this passage confused me. Did “not worrying” about the future mean not to think about it? Was it wrong to make plans or prepare? Were schedules and calendars counterproductive, or even sinful because they indicated a lack of faith in God’s provision? I’ve since come to understand that Jesus isn’t saying we shouldn’t think about or plan for the future, just that we shouldn’t worry about it. There’s a big difference between setting plans for tomorrow and obsessing over the minutia of tomorrow’s schedule. I don’t think it’s wrong to save money for a rainy day, but it would be wrong to tormentedly hoard money for the future. As with so many of Jesus’ sayings, this is about our heart posture more than our actions, and there is a vast difference between a thoughtfully planning heart and a tortured, anxiety-ridden one.

What does this mean for me and my strange concoction of emotions surrounding old photos of my kids? I DON’T think it means I should stop looking at those photos, or that it’s wrong to be cognizant of how quickly my kids are growing up. But instead of dwelling in those emotions, I should bring those worries to God in prayer, asking Him to help me make peace with past, present, and future. I believe He can redeem my emotions, transforming my sadness into gratitude for the memories we’ve made and are making and those that are yet to come. And He can help shift my gaze away from this temporary time with my earthly family and towards the eternity we will all spend with Him.

Now, I am the queen of tying things up with a pretty bow, which is why I’m tempted to end this post with that sweet sentiment. But honesty demands that I acknowledge how impossible letting “tomorrow worry about itself” can seem. Anxiety is a prickly issue and one of the enemy’s most insidious weapons, and forty years of grappling with this foe tells me that simply praying about it and trusting God are hardly one-and-done solutions. Thank the Lord that He is a patient God who forgives every misstep and is there to pick me up when I stumble back into cycles of worry and fear. He is trustworthy, even when I struggle to trust, and He is a source of comfort and peace in moments that feel anything but peaceful. He has invited me to cast my anxieties on Him, and in the valleys of darkness and sadness, I know He is with me and in Him there is joy and peace.

*I recognize that not every parent gets the chance to watch their children grow, and anxiety over kids’ health and well-being is a whole other level of parenting anxiety that I won’t even begin to address here.