"Fear is an evil, corroding thread; the fabric of our lives is shot through with it."
- Alcoholics Anonymous
"For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power
and of love and of a sound mind."
- 2 Timothy 1:7
Not all fear is bad. If I am about to pull out into traffic and I have missed or misjudged the distance of an oncoming vehicle and they honk, alerting me to their presence or closeness, fear makes react quickly to prevent me from getting into an accident. If I slip into self will and start seeing warning signs that I am heading in a direction that can lead me back into bondage or death, fear of what happens when I don't walk with God can inspire me to quickly repent and surrender my will to His. If I awake in the middle of the night and smell smoke fear can make me get myself and my family out of the house before we are trapped and die in flames. Fear of a real and immediate danger can help us react in positive ways to preserve our safety. That's a good thing.
But those real and present dangers are actually the minority of the fears that can rule our lives and cripples us. Some fears do little more than make us miserable, rob us of our joy and create barriers in our relationship with God. These fears can almost always be essentially broken down into one or more of three categories: the fear of getting or having to endure what we do not want, the fear of not getting what we do want and the fear of losing what we have. In each of these fear focuses on self.
I spent quite a bit of time thinking and praying about this last night as I lay in bed. My browser is currently set to a size that I would have been able to read the screen from across the room not too long ago, but this morning I struggle to read what I am typing. My vision is failing fast, and that is a situation that inspires my spirit to fear. This is a natural instinct, a response given to us by God. It only becomes a problem when the instinct goes awry and we respond in the wrong way.
The squirrel crossing the road sees the oncoming car. He darts one way, stops and darts the other way, then becomes unsure what to do and either freezes in fear or goes the wrong direction and becomes road kill. It's a scene that plays out regularly in East Texas. We do the same thing. Blindly driven by fear we react, react again, flee, fight, flee, freeze and get crushed under the weight of what we feared. There is a better way.
When we respond to fear by turning to, listening to and trusting in God, rather than causing our destruction, that initial fear can drive us closer to Him, to our place of peace and refuge. We can remind ourselves that God is indeed good and loves us, that there is more going on than we can see, that this situation, no matter how frightening or bad, is temporary and not eternal. Help is available for us to respond to the things we are afraid of in wisdom and with a sound mind. Fear takes a possibility of the future and causes us to experience the pain of it in the present, but faith reminds us that we are not alone, that God can and will dance with us in the flames and prevent our being consumed, as He did with Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego. (Daniel 3)
Part of surrender is trusting that God's purpose is better than what we want. We can trust Him to be good to us. When we walk through the Valley of the Shadow we do not have to fear evil, but that doesn't mean that there isn't evil there. Sometimes there is. The land God gave His people was filled with dangers and enemies. He didn't remove the threats before they got there. He didn't say they wouldn't face things or have to stand and be courageous in the face of fear. But He did make it clear that when they put their trust in Him that He would do the fighting for them.
Today when we are afraid, let us run to our refuge that is found in relationship and closeness with God. Whether we find deliverance from the situation or the grace to go through it, to endure, our lives will be better. It is better if the worst we imagine happens and we go through it hand in hand with our loving Daddy then it is to be spared every fear and discomfort and not learn to lean on Him, not be driven closer, not discover the depths of His love, the goodness of His grace.
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