A British poet named John Gay (1685-1732) wrote a lengthy comic poem called “A New Song of New Similes.” It was a tale of love lost, full of “as” and “like” as he compared his predicament to well-known objects in life. For example, “Pert as a pear-monger I’d be, if Molly were but kind; cool as a cucumber could see the rest of womankind.” That’s the first known use of “cool as a cucumber,” which has become a standard idiom in today’s language. (Even in the early eighteenth century it was believed that the inside of a cucumber was 15-20 degrees cooler than the outside.)

Then a century later, in 1885, another Brit, Sir J. Hannen, made a speech that was published in a law journal in which he made reference to “a calm and collected and rational mind.” So now we have cool, calm, and collected entering the language to refer to the human temperament—but not all together. The words hadn’t yet been joined into a single phrase at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Procter & Gamble Company came close in the early 1960s when they marketed their Secret brand of deodorant. In a television commercial, spokeswoman Katy Winters says that Secret deodorant will keep you “cool and calm”—though not “collected.” But wait for it—a voice-over at the end of the commercial says Secret will keep your family “cool, calm, protected.” So close! Not quite “cool, calm, collected”—but as close as anyone has been able to find as a source for the popular phrase.

Whoever finally put cool and calm and collected together in a single phrase hit on a winning combination. Besides the catchy alliteration of the three Cs, the phrase absolutely captures a need that everybody has at one time or another. Whether we’re hot in the summer or hot under the collar . . . whether agitated or anxious . . . whether disorganized or disarrayed . . . cool, calm, and collected is how we want to feel.

Too often we lose our cool, can’t calm down, and seem unable to collect our thoughts. It’s understandable when we sweat the really big issues in life, but when we start “sweatin’ the small stuff,” we know we’ve breached the boundary between cool and cooked. It’s time to regroup.

But let’s be honest. Does the world today seem cool, calm, and collected to you? It doesn’t to me either. If we’re basing our temperament on the status of the world around us we should be “hot, harried, and hopeless”—and many people are! Our task is to heed the exhortation of the apostle Paul (via British Bible translator J. B. Phillips) not to “let the world around [us] squeeze [us] into its own mould” (Romans 12:2, J. B. Phillips).

Just because the world is on fire with conflicts and uncertainty doesn’t mean we have to be. Our challenge is to discover and apply God’s reasons for being cool, calm, and collected—that is, for Living with Confidence in a Chaotic World. That was the title of my 2009 book and the subsequent broadcast series by the same name. This month on Turning Point Radio we are airing those messages again. Given the increasing chaos in our world, it seemed to us to be the perfect series. We must keep our spiritual wits about us as we navigate the uncertainties of life.

In addition to the radio broadcast, our July issue of Turning Points Magazine is dedicated to the theme of living a cool, calm, and collected life. Yes, that’s a modern expression, but it contains ancient truth. We can preserve our saltiness and our light, keep our testimony and our confession, and balance our separateness and relevancy while living in a world that seems to be coming unglued.

Pray this month about letting your spiritual coolness influence others, letting your calmness keep you focused on God’s promises, and letting your collectedness keep you thoroughly equipped to run the race and fight the good fight.

This world as we know it is passing away. Because what we have is eternal, we can overcome the world. It’s time to stop “sweatin’” this life—and live cool, calm, and collected!