Fear

When I wake up in the morning, I more often than not find myself dreading the day – this is for inexplicable reasons and I can pinpoint it back as early as my elementary school years.  I vaguely remember not feeling this way while I was a stay-at-home Mom, so I’m thinking that this “fear” is based on worldly expectations, meaning the fear of not measuring up.

As a child, I was a willing and good student.  As a teen, to feel more accepted I felt I had to be less willing.  In college, I had one professor who didn’t show up, so neither did I.  He sent his TA in to turn on the lecture via movie reel.  Most of us would show up, get counted as present, then leave when the TA left.  When it came to grading, we all had to do one paper and most of us presented papers that had only had their covers ripped off and replaced with our own.  In my worst nightmare, I dream that I never graduated from college because of this one course.  My not showing up and doing the work was a rationalization because the professor didn’t either and he was the department head!  But what this really speaks to was that I wasn’t the person God meant me to be because I cow towed to standards beneath those I knew to be right.  My fear is based on my unwillingness to just be who I am and not worry about what others think of me.

There are some people whose childhoods might have been less than, who overcompensate by working harder than they may have to, just so that they won’t face their fear of whatever it was they felt they lacked.  There are others whose parents worked so hard, that they lacked the family life they saw their friends having and so they now find themselves unsure of how to navigate with people and have resorted to becoming people pleasers.  It is a vicious cycle, because if you look at what I’ve just written, it could be the story of one family.  In both cases they are operating in the extreme – overdoing the areas because they don’t want to feel the lack they experienced at that pivotal point in their lives.

Somehow fear attached itself to God in my mind.  It is as if God is some stern taskmaster with a lightning bolt stun gun rod.  I fear stepping out of line because I know (and I’m using a quote from a friend here) that I have a bull’s eye target drawn on my back and God just might pop me one!  As I am learning, by having to unlearn first, God is not some formidable taskmaster, He is a loving Father wanting us to experience His peace and joy.  Satan is the father of fear.

He’s the one tormenting me in my waking moments, redoubling his efforts when I am vulnerable, pointing out to me that I don’t have what it takes.  He is the one making me feel less than qualified to do whatever job I’ve decided to do.  But again, as I am learning, God puts in curveballs not to mess with us but instead to mess with Satan’s course of action.  We are just sometimes caught in the middle, seemingly not knowing which way to turn.

As stated in my example of my school years, in hindsight, by succumbing to the pressure to conform to someone else’s expectations I bought into Satan’s plan.  By choosing truth, understanding who I am, a child of God, I don’t need to make that choice, I am free to be me.  The rat race we are running is a vicious circle, and the person whose wrath we are afraid to incur is not the head cheese.  We go to great lengths to make favorable appearances to others, while inside each of us, we are quaking with a homemade bomb of stress because we are afraid to be found out.

F.E.A.R if looked at as an acronym is False Evidence Appearing Real.  If we believe we are less than, if we believe we don’t have enough, then both these things become self-fulfilling prophecies.  But in the midst of our worries, there is a high percentage of what we fear that never comes to be.  In this economy most of us are fearful of what it is we will be able to retire on and I can include myself in this group, but I’ve got a question.  If we continue pushing our stresses to the nth degree, we might not even have to worry about this, because we will be dead at much earlier ages.  Disease is a byproduct of stress, so in essence, we are making ourselves sick by not taking the time to de-stress now.  Our problem isn’t that we have a health care crisis, it is that we have a disease prevention crisis.  Does anyone see the cycle I’m trying to depict here?

As we live our lives out of envy, we will always see “stuff” we wish we had, but in the attempt to accumulate that “stuff” we are slowly killing ourselves with stress in our efforts to buy it, clean it, fix it, replace it and stay up to date with it.  Technology has us wrapped around its fickle finger because it is ever advancing.  I loved the commercial about the family who buys the newest television (3D) and as they are delivering that TV, the side of the delivery truck is extolling the virtues of the next generation of 4D……what the heck is 4D?

I’m stopping here and going out for a walk before the sidewalks become flat escalators and I get no benefit for exercising!

Looking up!
Barb