Gaudete! The following verse is taken from the Epistle for the Third Sunday of Advent in the Ancient Rite:
Be nothing solicitous; but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your petitions be made known to God. (Phil 4:6)
This isn’t Hakuna Matata from The Lion King, as in “no troubles.” Solicitousness is the vice of excessive worry: Anxiety. And there is certainly no shortage of it today. The remedy for this is nothing less than total abandonment to the Divine Providence. What have you got to lose? Resolve to try it for a week, and see what happens. If it didn’t kill you, try for a month. Then three months.
God is in control. He is, right now, controlling every aspect of the physical universe. He knows where you are and what you are going through. If He stopped thinking about you for a nanosecond, you would cease to exist. So, while you very well may have “troubles,” you should turn them over to the Lord, and trust in Him. Trust also the future to Him. Use what troubles you have as a tool to draw yourself closer to Him, uniting your will with His.
Interesting. In the modern dictionary, solicitous is “showing great care” for someone – which we want. But OK, its etymology is Latin sollicitus “restless, uneasy, careful, full of anxiety”.
With respect to God, I think the error is: Thinking you can manipulate God, with your nonstop mix of begging & praises.
Then you find out, you can’t. It works on some human lords, or, say, a Roman paterfamilias. But it doesn’t work on The Lord.
The modern Bible translations use “anxiety”
Except…the parable of the widow and the unjust judge comes to mind, telling us to pray and persevere and even “nag” always; conversely, your point of view is backed by the experience of many, including myself who has prayed for a particular intention for thirty years, yet recently had a miraculous answer to another one very quickly. But, yes, God is definitely not a cosmic vending machine, and His ways are truly not our ways and as far as the heavens are above the earth, so far are His thoughts above ours. Mysterious indeed.