Fear: An evaluated look, inspired by my Pastor

Fear: The root to the majority of our mistakes. It's the one thing God immediately drives from our hearts. It's
something that causes our faith to not work. It's something (ironically) that we're afraid to admit we have. It pushes us to do extraordinary things. It causes us to make terrible mistakes.

Tonight, Pastor Seth Trenda preached a really relevant message about "Brain Storms". About what happens in our minds when the Truth of God begins to conflict with our fears, our worries, our negative thoughts. He painted a vivid image of a thunderstorm swirling in our minds. The confusion. The worry. The Pain. The Fear that consumes us. I was struck uncommonly by this particular message.

Fear has always been relevant in my life.

When I was 9 years old I remember one of the worst nights of my life. My family was living on twenty acres near that Kalamath Falls area. Just outside of Chiloquin, Oregon. My father was away, dealing with some issues regarding our property. My three siblings and I were with my Grandmother outside. It was just turning dusk. A truck stormed through our property, coming to rest just outside our trailers. When we went outside, we found my father's ex-girlfriend and some older man sitting in the truck. They were clearly quite drunk. When my grandmother confronted them, the woman got out of the car and began screaming at my Grandmother. For whatever reason she didn't like her. In a few minutes my sixty plus grandmother was laying on the ground while a thirty something year old two hundred pound woman beat her to a bloody pulp. I have never been more afraid in all of my life. I remember my oldest sister and my little brother trying to pull her off my grandmother. All I could do was stand there and cry.

I didn't do anything. I was too afraid. To this day, I wish I had been brave enough to do something. Anything to stop her.

When I got older, I developed quite a hate for fear. I despise being afraid. I am too afraid of what might happen if I allow fear to control a situation (another irony). Sometimes I am belligerently aggressive about a situation because of how afraid I am of it. Often times, I make absolutely terribly decisions because I refuse to be afraid. I always see fear as being my enemy. I respond defensively to situations because of the fear that it might produce.

Tonight though, sometime dawned on me. There is a little something to fear that I never realized. I have always been good at "overcoming" my fears. In fact I prefer the "shock and awe" "overkill" kind of attitude towards it. What I have no been good at, is finding hope in my fears. When I think a situation is hopeless, I push through the fear anyway, but I do so hopelessly. I don't expect it to go well. I don't believe I have a possibility of success.

I try. Half heartily. I never invest too much into a situation or a plan because I allow my fears to take the hope. How. Utterly. Terrible. How stupid is that? I make war against fear but allow it to take the spoils. I give up the whole reason to be fighting in the first place. I surrender the prize. HOPE. And with hope goes everything else. Joy. Love. Overcoming.

As I reflected tonight on Pastor Seth's message it really caused me to evaluate my attitude towards fears. How I deal with them. The problem we have is that we allow our fears to define our hope. We have a specific idea about how a situation should turn out. We put our hope in that. Then, we put all our fear into it. When it doesn't come out the way we wanted and exactly what we feared comes on us (Job 3:25), we lose that hope. I think instead, our attitude should be to put our hope in God's goodness manifesting in a situation. Allow our hope to be that He will finish what he starts (Philippians 1:6).

Have hope that despite how you'd like the situation to turn out, or how you think it should turn out, God is doing a GOOD work in your life. Place hope in that.