Do not worry

Easter was this past weekend. It’s been a week after Passover ended.

If you celebrated either, or both, you know this is a week that carries something. A thread of liberation runs through both holidays, ancient and stubborn, refusing to be rushed into the past. And every year, I find myself returning to it.

But this year, it’s even more needed. I suspect I’m not alone.

I grew up Southern Baptist, and although these days I’m not religious, I am still a Believer. So, in honor of this past Easter, I want to share my favorite Bible verse: Matthew 6:25-26:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

This verse is what I’ve lived my life by, and I really leaned on this verse during my years as a freelance TV producer. The rhythm of that work was feast and famine — work intensely for a few months, then stop entirely, then wait. And my friends, who were in the same industry, would watch me move through the quiet stretches without spiraling and ask: “How do you do that? How do you not fall into the loop of ‘I’ll never work again’?”

I hadn’t thought of myself as unusual. The verse was just always there, underneath everything, a kind of quiet conviction: I will always have enough. It’s up to me to create the “more than enough” part.

That distinction matters — between “enough” and “more than enough.” One is given. The other is built. And what I’ve come to believe, after years of working with creative freelancers and entrepreneurs on the intersection of money and emotional wellness, is that the real work isn’t financial. It’s learning to trust the “enough” so you can build toward “more” without the desperation that poisons the whole endeavor.

In 2020, when I first published a version of this essay, we were deep in the early fog of a pandemic. The worry lists were very specific: will I get sick? Will someone I love get sick? Will there be food? Will there be work?

In 2026, the worry list looks different — but in some ways, it feels heavier because it’s less defined. The economy is lurching. Tariffs are reshaping prices before our eyes. Markets are swinging. Political chaos has become the ambient noise of daily life. Many of the creative entrepreneurs I work with are wondering whether this is the worst possible time to go out on their own — or whether staying in a soul-crushing job “for security” is actually the safer choice.

And underneath all of it runs a quieter, more personal kind of worry. The one that wakes you up at 3am and asks: Am I going to be okay?

One of my spiritual teachers says: when your worry list is a mile long, your faith is very small. When your worry list is short — or nonexistent — that’s the evidence of faith at work.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think this means we look away from what’s real. It doesn’t mean spiritual bypassing… pretending the world isn’t difficult or that injustice doesn’t exist or that money stress is just a mindset problem. It means something different. It means that underneath all the noise, there is still something that holds us. And that our ability to act — clearly, purposefully, from our values — depends on our ability to access that stillness even when everything around us is loud.

The birds do not sow or reap or store away in barns. And somehow they are always fed.

I also think about what it means to hoard — and why we do it.

We hoard when we don’t trust that more is coming. We hold tightly to what we have because releasing it feels like a free fall. We make decisions from scarcity — staying in jobs, relationships, situations that aren’t right for us — because the fear of having nothing feels more unbearable than the certainty of having something wrong.

I’ve watched this play out in my own family history, in ways that were severe and painful. I’ve watched it play out in client after client who was technically “making money” but emotionally living in famine, convinced that any abundance was temporary and any safety was borrowed.

And I’ve watched it play out in myself. Even now. Even knowing what I know.

Because the truth is, this isn’t a lesson you learn once. It’s a practice. Every time the markets drop, every time a contract falls through, every time the news cycle delivers something that makes the future feel uncertain — the invitation is the same: Can you return to the verse? Can you trust God, the Universe or a higher power?

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Here’s what I know about financial freedom — real financial freedom, not the Instagram version:

It isn’t about accumulation. It isn’t about a number in an account that finally makes you feel safe, because that number almost never comes, and if it does, it shifts. Real financial freedom is about having enough of a foundation that your decisions stop being driven by fear.

When you have that foundation — even an imperfect one, even a work-in-progress one — your worry list gets shorter. Not because the world becomes safer, but because you become steadier inside it. You make decisions from alignment instead of desperation. You stop staying stuck in situations that don’t serve you simply because you feel you have no other option.

That is what I want for everyone I work with. Not wealth as an end in itself. But the kind of inner steadiness that makes real choice possible.

And that steadiness — I believe with everything in me — begins before the money. It begins in the willingness to believe that you are taken care of. That you are not meant to hoard or white-knuckle your way through life. That the vault of opportunity, as Dr. King once said, is not empty.

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So today, two days after Easter, in the middle of a world that feels uncertain in too many directions to count — I want to offer you this small practice:

Write down your worries. Every single one. The financial ones, the political ones, the personal ones, the 3am ones. Get them out of your body and onto paper.

And then — however you understand this — give them over. Not to be passive or to abandon responsibility. But to be free enough to act from strength instead of fear. To make your next decision from your values, not from your worst-case scenario.

The birds don’t hoard. They don’t sow or reap or store away in barns.

And somehow, they are always fed.

With Love & Gratitude,