Fear is a Thief
Fear is a thief.
Fittingly, it is no coincidence that ancient scripture holds 365 times the phrase, “Fear not”. Please pause to embrace this immeasurable gift: You have been offered a life-empowering, worry-dispelling edict to not entertain fear for each day of the year. (There will be that one pesky day in leap year, but fear not, we’ll get you through it.)
I have lived enough decades to confidently present this proposition: How much time have you spent across the years of your life in anxious fear anticipating some dreaded event or adversity to befall you — only to now look back and realize most of those dreaded dragons never transpired? My guess is, the answers to this question will continue to provide ongoing revelation for weeks to come.
Imagine next you could get back all of those soul-wrenching, sleepless, adrenaline-surging cycles of fear spent anticipating the nightmarish dooms which ultimately never reached your doorstep. If time is money, has fear made you richer or poorer?
Many will say the opposite of faith is doubt, to which the late John Pinette would say, “Nay nay!”. No, the opposite of faith is: Certitude.
Likewise, the opposite of fear is not courage because courage implies there is still some valid reason to fear. No, the opposite of fear is: Trust.
My father worked two jobs for most of his career. I grew up in a middle-class town in the Northeast where the poor working-class areas were within walking distance. We were all members of the same community, went to school and played Little League together in the tech-free era when there were no Twitter mobs to tell us who the enemies among us were.
My father’s parents were Italian-American and deaf. Grandpa was deaf-mute and never made a sound but Grandma Rosie was able to mouth sounds and read lips to the extent I have treasured memories of our simple conversations at the kitchen table. She could watch TV and know what was being said! And, they all worked. Hard.
With four boys to feed, Rosie was a seamstress, Grandpa set type at the local newspaper and my Dad set up pins at the local bowling alley where the entirety of his pittance went straight to the family coffers to put food on the table. This remarkable family navigated the trip-wires of other-ness, handicap, the Great Depression, multiple drafts and served in world wars. Further, I can not remember a day that my father was out of a job.
I can hear the intersectionalists now, rifling across their oppression Rolodex trying to find that just-right, demeaning label to describe the precise nature of my unconscious white privilege. And, fear not; if they can’t find one, creating new social justice name tags is as easy as printing stimulus money here in the Dividing States of Woke America. Perhaps, it's better to say: It’s a privilege when you can work hard.
I have enjoyed the good fortune of running my own software firm for the past seven years with three of the greatest friends I could imagine. And like my father, I’ve not been out of work a single day since I graduated college. However, in late 2020, I could see the signs that my little consulting business might be out of work by year-end, and sure enough, I was right.
Sparing the details of enterprise technology software consulting, let’s simplify it: I’ve been unemployed all of 2021 so far. To which I hear, “Oh, that’s where he gets the time for all these blogs!” With a family, a mortgage, and dual college tuition bills, you would not be wrong to think it was time to embrace a big ol’ tree trunk full of fear. And you just might be right.
My first response was to simply holdfast to the character attributes of God which reveal His abundant nature and embrace his eternal sufficientness. While I would lay my life upon this claim, the fact is, we still have no work.
My second response was to call upon the promises of scripture and believe that if I had enough faith — not certitude — we will not only safely pass this blip on the radar screen but might even end up better than we were before. Well, a few months into this journey, and that has yet to be made manifest.
Enter fear.
When you face calamity and the immediate miracle has yet to be revealed, it’s only natural to consider what fear may have to offer from its little chest of horrors. So while I diligently tried to look away as I stiff-armed the fear-dragon with my best Heisman Trophy pose, after a few weeks I began to feel a strange unease: Why am I spending emotional energies trying to avoid this dragon? Positive thinking, avoidance and denial only delays the inevitable. What if instead, I simply stop to see what this worst-case scenario beast might actually look like?
While I am not by nature an anxious or fear-based person, after a few sleepless nights of worry I realized it was time to face the lurking dragon. I soberly considered: Greater men than I have suffered far worse trials and very close friends have had life-wrecking calamity burst through their door and flip all the furniture. What is to say I should be spared the same?
What a pity the writer of the book of James couldn’t be here to really understand the torturous horrors of our unbearable first world suffering, otherwise he never would have penned the words, “Consider it nothing but joy when you fall into all sorts of trials.” Joy?
History hints he was killed for his faith by stoning.
So I firmly set my feet, squared my shoulders, and faced; the dragon.
“What do you want? To drain what little savings I have? Ruin my credit score? Bankruptcy? Embarrassment? Take away my home? Ok, lets stare into what all that mighty really look like. Oh, and here’s a Tic-Tac for that janky green breath of yours.”
My wife and I are each other’s best friends since high school and eternal lovers. Our two boys are the greatest young men we could have ever dreamed of raising. Finances did not create these realities so lack of finances can never take them away. If we lose our quaint, 1937 center-hall colonial, that will not at all crimp the breath of God coursing through our lungs.
Enter Trust.
The passage, “To live is Christ and to die is gain”, is far too often used like a tug on the bus cord signaling a desire to get off the planet at the next stop. I have always been far more intrigued with the first half of the equation — to live is Christ. If my life is Christ, then every circumstance I face holds immeasurable value for glory to rise and joy to remain. And that includes bankruptcy.
I do not place my trust for some thing, rather I place my trust in some One.
I have a kneeler in my office. My business was birthed on that kneeler and one day soon I will share how I received this Divine little phone booth. For the past three months, my bible sits atop the kneeler opened to the book of Job — right now in chapter 42. It’s a worthy saying; if you think you are suffering unfairly, consider reacquainting yourself with Job’s season of colossal catastrophe.
After Job suffers loss that no human could ever imagine, and his friends espouse tomes of wisdom-less counsel, Adonai finally speaks. Job instantly puts his sufferings into perspective, cancels his three friends, and says:
“I had heard about you with my ears , but now my eyes have seen you . ”
We trust what we see. Better yet: We trust Who we see.
How much of our faith is based merely on what we’ve heard from pastors, preachers, parents, and friends? How much of our understanding of God is merely words we’ve heard. It’s entirely insufficient and lacks the personal nature of the abundant Christ life. This life in Christ is mere intellect until it becomes an entirely experiential cohabitation.
After staring down the dragon, he shrunk like the hairy orange monster on Bugs Bunny after being doused with a bottle of Reducing Oil. He since packed his bags, and rowed his tiny boat away.
Nothing about my circumstance has changed; I still have no work. But I have not wasted any more fear-fueled cycles worrying about what may happen.
Yes, God blessed the second half of Job’s life more than the first but the fulcrum of my life right now is the comma.
“I had heard about you with my ears , ”
I’ve spent far too much time living to the left of that comma. This new journey of unemployment has revitalized me to journey onward from the comma and settle for nothing less than life at that period.
“but now my eyes have seen you . ”
Remembering, a period is not just the end of a sentence but creates the space for the next one to be written.
I trust with all my heart. And, I’ll let you know when I reach the period.
