Part 1 of a 3-part series
Fear. It’s all around us, and I’m not just talking about well-known phobias like the fear of heights, snakes, spiders, or enclosed spaces. I’m talking about the subtle underlying fears that we battle with every single day, often without even realizing it. Things like the fear of rejection or disappointment... the fear of sickness, pain, or death… the fear of loneliness or loss… the fear of confrontation... the fear of not measuring up… even the fear of the unknown.
These kinds of fears beckon our attention as they tiptoe, creep, and slither through the crawl spaces of our minds, and we all experience them in some form or another throughout our lives, but what happens when these "subtle" fears become less subtle and actually start to consume our thoughts? That type of fear, friends, comes only from one place, and its goal is to rob us of our joy and paralyze us from living life to the fullest.
I know that fear. It robbed me once too. Then one day, God called me beyond the depths of my fear, and as I neared the surface to breathe and saw fear for what it truly was, it lost its cold numbing grip on me, and I was set free from its chains. And in that freedom, I found that I could truly breathe… perhaps for the first time.
Can you identify with this?
Have you ever felt fear’s chains holding you back?
Then read on, friends…
In the fall/winter of 2008, something extraordinary happened in mine and Jason’s life that, a few months later, resulted in us going on our first mission trip to two third-world nations on the other side of the globe. Many of the details of this experience and the mission trip that followed are stories for another day, but leading up to that trip, I was a 32-year old woman whose only experience out of America was a trip to a Caribbean island on our honeymoon a few years prior. While that island nation was also a third-world nation, we had stayed at a modern tourist resort, and I was too afraid to venture outside of the resort compound and had no desire to.
I really don’t know exactly at what point in my life I had become so afraid. In my early teens, I showed cattle, which included getting kicked, head-butted, and dragged through fields by animals weighing over 1,500 lbs. I don’t really remember being afraid in those situations. In high school, I was in drama club and performed on the stage in plays, but while there were always performance jitters, I don’t really recall being afraid. No, I really can’t recall when exactly it happened, but what I do know is that it crept in slowly.
Pretty early in my young life, it was the fear of rejection from friends and others at school. Later, it was the fear of experiencing disappointment and disappointing others by not meeting their expectations. That’s probably what prompted me to drop a class in high school (and later in college) because I was headed for a B or a C in the course, and I just couldn’t let that tarnish my straight “A” grade point average that I had placed so much value on.
By my early twenties, it was venturing into fear of not being able to control the things that happened in my life. I remember being at work in a customer service/tech support job when I had my first anxiety attack, a result, I’m sure, of an overwhelming fear of confrontation that I had developed by that point in life. A visit to the doctor later ensued, and I was prescribed medication to help “deal” with it…
Once I crossed into my thirties there were new fears on the horizon. My daily commute to work was longer than it had ever been, almost 40 minutes one way. With all this extra time on the road, I entertained fear’s suggestions in my thoughts even more… “What if I have a wreck on the way to work, and die? My husband and family would be heartbroken.”
Can you see how it creeps in? Slowly… step-by-step until it has you in its grip; methodically until your peace and joy in life are either so overshadowed by what is seemingly lurking over your shoulder and around the next corner or are simply snuffed out entirely like a candle.
But, friends, I’m happy to report that fear no longer has its mangy grip on me, because the Lord set me free from that prison!
Were it not for the catalytic event that sent us down the path to our first mission trip, I might still be tangled up in its grip today. But that trip forever changed my life, and God used it to deliver me from my most debilitating fear!
Read Part 2: How My Chains Were Broken
