I have a good friend who once experienced a really hard summer. I know, because I lived right down the street from her that summer in between college semesters. It all came back to a guy. A guy who cut her so hard to her core, that it shattered who she was. This is when the fear came. She could not be alone. She could not even get through a shower without crying, even though we were right outside in her living room. I remember, she started reading this book called The Gift of Fear. It was new then, but I found out that it got pretty popular. She read it, and it kinda helped her. I did not read it, but somehow, as I meditate on my current situation, this recollection of that summer comes back to me.
I have lived with fear for a long time. I have had many days of my life that were just like my friend's that summer. Some days where the fear shows up in the guise of anxiety and I just can't seem to get out of bed or function at all. Fear has been a crippling instrument to me. And in a way, it has had its "gifts" for me. The true root of all of this is "the object of my fear". This object sucked all the fear out of every other part of my life. To many people, it looked as if I feared nothing. I would prove this by carelessly putting myself in situations that others would avoid. My mantra seemed to say "There is nothing anyone can do to you that is as bad as what you have done to yourself". So many of my hollows were not filled with fear. But one cistern of my soul carried it all.
What am I afraid of, then? What is the crippling agent? Nothing external to me; just myself. Only God, myself and my four walls have ever seen the madness that lies within me. It saw the years of my darkness. I reflect on this with a shutter that runs down me. I know myself and I have seen my own potential for evil. An evil that has a complete disregard for others or myself. An evil that is in allegiance only to itself. It was a very dark time. So now, the object of my fear is "me". I carry it with me always and can never escape it the way one can run from a snake or spider. The memory of it is my haunting. My "gift of fear" has almost kept me from marriage, friendships, life and now, parenthood. I do not trust myself. It is a hard employment. Do I allow myself to function out in the world while knowing all along how much I can F everything up? I chose yes. So now, here I am, living among you under the guise of a normal citizen. However, I have a secret red "A" that is lashed on my skin underneath my priestly frock. Only I know it well.
Fear has held me hostage. Now Christ comes to set me free of it. Free to live without it. But as long as those images of my past and their realities remain in my mind, I can not. "Okay", He says, "Then we will walk through it together. I will show you its beauty". But I fear this even so. I repel at the thought of having to walk back through what I have worked so hard to get past. And yet, I can not even conceive of what He is offering me. A chance to live without this spine numbing fear. It is too good to be true. I have never even dreamt of the possibility.
Skip with me now to faith. I have never had it well. It seems, no matter how many miracles God does in my life, now matter that He has never once let me down, I still feel as if He is going to screw me at every new trial. I have such little faith. Reason alone, should lead me to faith at this point. I can look back on my life and make a strong case for belief in the goodness of God. But I don't do this. I never have.
What happens instead is that I look at the possibility that I may fail or that things may not work out, or that God would let me lose everything and everyone and send me to die. There is no guarantee in the whole Bible that tells me that things will always work out for me. So I look at this and see that I have two options:
A) Choose to believe that everything God does is motivated out of love for me and so NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, it is good and right and best for me, and I am never alone. OR . . .
B) Choose to accept that if things don't work out for me, its probably an indicator that God does not really care for me, and wait in fear of the impending doom, hating all along you have to rely on such a power-hungry God.
Believe it or not, I always choose B. Always. I am disgusted that I have little to no control and that I HAVE to rely on God. But you know what. I am not all wrong. God never does guarantee us good things and success. What I do with this, though, is mix it with fear and live in it. Every situation like this is an excruciating experience for me. I go through it with fear and pain. Why would I do this to myself? What is the incentive? Good question.
The answer is one that only came to me recently and is the prompt for this essay. I realized the other day, that I don't want to seem ignorant. This is my view of faith. Faith is something people use when they are out of "warm fuzzy answers". They can't guarantee that God will make everything successful and "right". They can't say that it will all work out fine. At this dead end, they use faith. They say that, even with all of these bad possibilities, they will trust in God. I look at them and laugh. I say that what they are doing is eating sugar when they run out of candy in hopes of getting the same good feeling. Faith looks like a delusion of truth. Its looks like a refusal to accept that God may not help you out. That you may fail and crash and burn and lose everything and what would that say about your God. It's like those words from Job (13:15) that I can never understand: "Though he slay me, yet will I will hope in him." Hell, no! If God is going to screw me, you better bet that my anger and challenging distance will be ripe and ready.
But, you know what . . .
He never has screwed me.
On the contrary, He has always shown me His utmost goodness. Not everything has always gone the way I wanted, but God has ALWAYS restored me with some great act of goodness.
So what the hell am I doing!
Its about fear and faith. Attributing too much to one and not enough to the other. I have only just realized what they both really are. By misunderstanding faith, I make fear my only viable option. Faith is not a delusion of truth. It can very much accept wholeheartedly that God never promises us success and freedom from suffering and failure. It can look at those options and say "Yep. Things may end up bad. This may suck.", but what faith gives now is not a rose-colored pacification. It is the hope of the possibility of goodness. There are two options: things may end up very bad, or things may work out good. No one can predict which will happen. The choice we have is how to live in the time up until resolution. I have always chosen to live with fear over faith. But I am only realizing now, that faith does not insult my intelligence. It is a way for me to choose freedom from my crippling fear until God preforms His sovereignty. Faith is a sober acceptance of all possibilities, but a choice to live with peace and hope in the meantime.
I have never done this.
So God offers me this lesson. He is giving me a way to live without crippling fear. The Bible says that "Perfect love casts out fear." (1John 4:18) My problem is that perfect love is an exponent of God and His goodness. I have never let love cast out my fear, because I never let myself believe that God is motivated by love when it comes to the hard times. I have to actually trust in that love for it to affect my fear. Does this all sound simple? I can hardly believe it has taken me almost 2 decades to get this. For the first time in my life, I am resolving to live without this damaging fear. I am tired of being afraid. I am ready to walk back through my debilitating past. I am ready to be free. With every part of me, I swear this. I am ready to be free.
