My nightlight for my night terrors.
My body guard in a dark alley.
That’s Yahweh,
Canceling my fear.
My life’s safe house,
That’s Yahweh.
Remind me again
Why I should fear anyone.
(Everyday Psalms, Psalm 27, page 55)
As trust in God fills me, I’m drained of fear.
(Everyday Psalms, Psalm 56, page 131)
I hate my fears. They cloud too many of my relationships and keep me from too many good things. It’s only when I articulate them that I can move away from them into trust and action or trust and patient inaction, depending on the situation.
Many of our fears seem justified. I fear rattlesnakes with cause — they can kill me! But what should be a healthy respect for poisonous creatures has expanded into an irrational loathing of all squirmy reptiles my kids like to torture me with. And my fear of heights keeps me much farther from any ledge than necessary, heart beating wildly within me.
But there are deeper relational fears that cripple us emotionally and keep us from the lives God created us to live. I have a hunch none of us escape middle school without significant emotional/relational damage. In fact, I suspect most of us spend the rest of our lives undoing the self-protective decisions we made during those formative and vulnerable years.
In other words, when people treat us poorly, we tend to make personal rules for life in order to protect ourselves from further hurt. “I don’t sing” — they’ll laugh at me. “I don’t share my feelings” — they’ll use them against me. “I don’t make phone calls” — they get annoyed if I interrupt them. “I don’t get excited about anything” — I’ll look stupid if things don’t pan out. “I don’t speak in front of a group” — they’ll mock me when I fail. And so on.
What we’re most afraid of, more than snakes and heights, is not being loved. Or to put it the other way around, we’re afraid of people treating us in anti-love ways.
The remedy for this is an experience of love, of real love that doesn’t falter or fail. If we can experience one relationship in which we are absolutely safe, we can step out of our fears. Fear keeps us from loving others, but love can kill our fears (see 1 John 4:17-19).
We find this fear-killing love in our relationship with God. The Scriptures offer a bunch of words to express this love: grace, mercy, faithfulness, reconcilation, adoption, forgiveness, kindness, covenant loyalty. Each of these and other words look at God’s love for us from slightly different but overlapping angles.
But it’s prayer that gets us in on this fear-killing love. It’s prayer that makes this theological reality a living reality. It’s prayer that teaches us to trust this love of God. But the sad truth is we expect God to let us down the same way others let us down. We’re afraid God won’t love us the way we hope he’ll love us. Our praying confronts this fear and draws us into the vast, spacious, never-ending love of God where fear has no home at all. Our praying also names our other fears and enables us to experience the kind presence of the one who will never leave us or forsake us, the one who leads us through the valley of the shadow of death.
Prayer: Gracious God, fear makes my life so small, focused on protecting myself instead of moving outward toward others in love for them. And for you. But not only do I fear harm for myself and those I love from other people, I find that I’m afraid you won’t love me as I hope you will. I fear being let down by you despite your promises of covenant loyalty to me and to all your people. Help me to live in the center of your love instead of the center of my fears. In Jesus. Amen.