Psalm 27:1   The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

Fear A Lot? Fear Not!

The week starts with more bad news, what appears to be more losses in my life; at least situational wise.  I don’t know if you ever get jaded from hardship, but I’ve experienced so many difficulties in three years, that I don’t want to sound like it’s no big deal, but it’s just doesn’t have that initial titanic-hits- the-iceberg impact. Shock is buffered. Anger, simmered.

Fear, however, is the monster that does not seem to lose its dagger-like incisors that can shadow me throughout the day and well into the thick of my nightly slumber.  I try to outrun the monster, it catches up to me.  If I deny it, it seems to give me the heebie-jeebies when I least likely expect it like during the times I am securely reclined into the bend of my “Jersey Strong’s” arm.

Ahhh, but on those days and nights, despite my cowardly spine, once courage emerges as if derived from rubbing a genie’s magic lamp, I turn to face the monster head on, and go so far as to lean into it, it loses its volume and wilts. The concept of facing your fears is nothing new. How to do it is the clincher. How the hell do you face your fear while you live life walking a tightrope and the big secret—one you do not even admit to yourself—is that you are deathly afraid of heights?

As far as the great fear/faith debate goes, and whether the two can live under the same roof, is a matter of semantics. Plain and simple, humans feel fear, even if only on occasion; in this same vein, even those mortals who occupy a house built on faith can trip up and panic especially when they witness the snarl of a monster! 

I look at it this way. Tripping is okay. We get up. Falling and breaking a limb in an emotional nosedive is another issue. We stay down for prolonged periods. This is unhealthy. A condition to avoid at all costs. Again, how? How do we do this?  Well, wtf, where’s the faith? When you don’t feel it, think it, believe it—find someone who does and catch the fire! Or read or watch something uplifting that feeds the faith and starves the fear to death. Pray/ meditate even if it feels forced and fake. Volunteer to help clean up an elderly neighbor’s yard. Employ positive actions to get to the non-tangible end product; for faith, after all, is believing in what we do not see, do not hear, cannot touch.  But have no fear; frame it as a job that must be done even when you’re down and out and plumb tired. Walk that tightrope if it means crawling on all fours. Stop thinking that He won’t be there because He is. He has been there all along. Though things and people and circumstance may fail you; He will not. He is your protein drink. Your stronghold. The safety net under the tightrope and the One who will squash a rampaging five-hundred-foot, two-thousand ton monster into the likes of a midge. 

So, getting back to my own personal story, I had a lot of bad news, I walk a tightrope, I am afraid, but I know that it is only an illusion for I believe in faith…the one real thing that I can always count on.