Category Archives: fear
Step away from the vacuum. And take heart.
If you’ve followed me for any small amount of time, you know I love my three big dogs. Three golden retrievers, with three distinct personalities and three times the shedding.
That’s why I also love my Pet Special Dyson Vacuum. We spent nearly all of a tax return on the purple beauty a couple years ago. And it’s been worth every penny. Nary a day goes by that we don’t fill the chamber with one–usually two–loads of fur.
And when the vacuuming is over, we sit, breathless, on the sofa, and gaze adoringly at our three golden retrievers.
Who gaze adoringly right back at us.
Alas, I know their adoration is not of the human variety. Scientists say canines are incapable of such enigmatic functions as true feelings. No, their adoration stems from relief.
Relief that we finally turned off the dad-gum vacuum.
Whenever we turn it on, the three of them take turns running toward the lights and roar to sniff it, then scamper away–a furry blur of spinning, ineffective, slippery steps on the hard floor–because they’re
scared.
to.
death.
What the dogs think the vacuum will do to them is beyond me. Do they think it will eat them? Devour them in one, giant suck? (Goodness knows a Dyson could.) Do they think the vacuum wants to fight? Steal their food? Harm me or my husband or my kids?
Sometimes, sunlight dances off the plastic on the vacuum, and the dogs become momentarily lost in a giddy chase of shadows.
Then they remember.
The vacuum is on.
And it’s coming to get them.
I’m not much different than they are, of course. I scurry about my days, worrying about the noise and clatter and giant sucking sounds made by distractions and the devil himself, as he pushes roars of disappointment and unmet expectations, illness and pain my way. Whether focused at me or loved ones, the monstrous growls cause me to live in fear and with apprehension.
Until I realize: these things cannot hurt me.
Not eternally, anyway.
Unlike my dogs, I have the ability to read scripture (akin to the Dyson instruction manual), and understand that though loud and scary and overpowering, the things of the world cannot touch me.
Because I belong to Him.
You belong to Him.
And He overcomes the world.
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” ~John 16:33 (NIV)
Like this:
three red birds
Before I knew what life could do to a person . . . before I knew what had been done to me . . . I felt peace. I remember it, whole and holy, round and full, like the weight of a newborn infant in a mothers arms.
It was the sort of peace that comes from a youth undented and undaunted by the hammers of hurt.
The sort of peace that lives in a heart that has not yet realized people really are capable of evil . . . of lies . . . of betrayal . . . of stealing innocence, no matter how old we are when someone snuffs the last piece of us out.
Holed out, hollowed and spent, fear fills us first.
Unless we believe God and His promise to pour His Holy Spirit into us.
Unless we believe His promise to never leave us alone.
Only then, by releasing the clutch of our unbelief, can we let fear, unfettered, flee from our hearts.
The other day, I realized the depths of my unbelief as fear and shame overwhelmed me once again. I ran down the path in town, spindly brush, naked trees and silence surrounding me.
Help.
Me.
Overcome.
And then, unrequested and unrehearsed, the birds appeared.
Bright, red cardinals. Chests bursting and fat with downy, winter feathers.
First one.
Then a second.
Then a third.
Three cardinals stained red flew wild across my path. And I remembered God has something important to say when He says it in threes.
I died for you, He said.
I died for you, He said.
I died for you, He said.
So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose?
If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us?
And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us.
Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture . . . We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
Romans 8:31-39 (TMV)
Like this:
Pasturing freely
Some twenty years ago, I traveled to one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I spent three weeks there in January, when the lakes are frozen three feet deep, holding up our teams of dogs and sleds, fully-loaded logging trucks driving across them.
Untainted nature hugged my heart. I danced in the freedom of the unspoiled.
And I learned.
Beauty belies danger beneath surfaces.
Beholding the pristine exposes raw places.
And stepping into the uncharted brings fear.
My little suburban home is far from those Northwoods lakes and tributaries. But I’m still called into the wild. The Pristine stands before me and beckons me to follow, into fearsome and uncharted places.
I’m learning.
Still and always learning.
That the fear is the blessing.
Pushing through the trepidation is the reward.
Gratefulness in the uncharted is the way to go.
“It was cold, bitterly cold, and I hurried back into the cabin and crawled into my sleeping-bag . . . Beside me was my pack and in a pocket my brush-worn copy of Thoreau. I took it out, thumbed through it by the light of the candle. ‘We need,’ he said, ‘to witness our own limits transgressed and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.’” ~Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness
