I met Death coming toward our town,
So I stopped him and asked him why…
He told me that one hundred souls
In our town had been picked to die.

I rushed back to tell the people.
I had to warn all of my friends;
To let them know one hundred souls
Were picked by Death to meet their ends.

“One hundred people,” Death had said.
Instead one thousand souls had died.
I ran and caught Death as he left,
To make him tell me why he’d lied.

He said he had no time for me;
Death is always in a hurry.
He claimed he took a hundred souls;
All the others died of worry.

It is a scientific fact that worry can cause early death. The nine hundred people in this poem that weren’t scheduled to die worried so much that they joined the hundred who were.

In the true Christian’s vocabulary, the word worry should be replaced with concern. A Christian should have no worry in his life, because he knows that God is in charge.

Of course, the other extreme is the attitude of the Christian who thinks that since God is in charge, no action is required on his or her part. I’ve heard the Christian parent say, “I’m really too busy to spend a lot of time with my children, I’ve committed them to God and he will take care of them.” Concern is a Christian’s responsibility.