We all become afraid of something, sometime.
We may not admit it.
Truth be told, we may not even know it.
Indeed, our deepest and most debilitating fears go mostly unnamed, and reside conveniently hidden beneath the thin veneer of other nobler values.
We insulate our fears with virtuous words like “precaution,” “common sense,” “righteousness anger,” or “religious zeal.”
But the soul knows better.
So often we say what we say, and we do what we do, not because we are at our core all that truthful; but because we are scared to death.
Scared of what?
Of losing. Of winning. Of trying. Of failing.
We fear knowing and being known. We fear doing and being undone.
And as strange as it may seem, we even fear truly loving; suspecting that at some level, a deeper love of him/her/it/them will demand a vulnerability and risk-of-soul that we are not quite ready to put on the line.
Yes. We fear.
All through the human journey, we are both mobilized and paralyzed by a thousand reasonable and unreasonable fears that manage us from within.
So what do we do about it?
What does our faith have to say about the experience of fear?
Do we ignore it? Deny it? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Do we resist it? Fight it? Force it back into hiding? Or do we face it, embrace it, and welcome fear as our teacher?
The scriptures have much to say about the life-taking affect of fear and the liberating power of God to deliver us from it. According to 2 Timothy 1:7 (for example),
“God did not give us the spirit of fear; but of power, love and self-discipline.”
This Sunday we begin a powerful 3-part series in which we learn to recognize and confront our fears by tapping into the power, love and self-discipline already offered and available to us in Jesus Christ.
