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from fear to desire

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

—Madeleine L’Engle

Fear not!

—Jesus

One night when I was in college I came home alone to my dark apartment, unlocked the door, walked in, and slammed it shut behind me. After I took several steps I began to feel that something was off. I looked back, and there in the shadows behind the door, shrouded by the night, was a man. I didn’t scream. I didn’t run. I didn’t even move. My legs simply turned into Jell-O, and I collapsed onto the floor. Great to know what I do in a life-threatening situation. I’ve always been a little disappointed by my petrified reaction. Still, fear will do that to a person. (The man turned out to be my roommate’s boyfriend playing a joke on me. And yes, he felt terrible for it.)

In that moment when fear gripped me, I was utterly powerless. Have you ever had those awful dreams where you need to cry out to save someone or to save yourself—and for the life of you, you can’t utter a sound? Or you need to get away, but your legs feel frozen and you cannot move, cannot run? We’ve all had those dreams. They are horrible.

Fear paralyzes. Fear in its mildest, tamest form is a party pooper. It is a wet blanket that smothers the fiery passion God deposited in your heart when he formed you. Fear freezes us into inaction. Frozen ideas, frozen souls, frozen bodies can’t move, can’t dream, can’t risk, can’t love, and can’t live. Fear chains us.

beauty vs. fear

You probably know the famous passage directed toward women by the old apostle Peter. It is a passage normally used to discuss true inner beauty:

Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear. (1 Pet. 3:3–6 NIV 2011)

Notice that the core of the passage is not beauty per se, but how to get to true beauty, which is this: do not give way to fear. Women are particularly vulnerable to fears of all kinds because we care, because we love, because in God’s gracious design we are vulnerable and gloriously so. Our vulnerability is part of what makes us women; it enables us to love as we do, to protect relationship as we do, to comfort and offer mercy, to bring a creative eye to the world. And yes, it also makes us vulnerable to fear.

Fear is defined as a vital response to physical and emotional danger. If we were unable to feel it, we wouldn’t protect ourselves from legitimate threats. So fear can have its place. God invites us to live in reality. God doesn’t want us living a fantasy life or a life of denying reality, like Cleopatra, the queen of Denial. God wants us to live a life where we continually grow in wisdom: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). There is a good fear, a holy fear, a fear that makes you want to honor and do homage to the one who deserves it. The fear that gets us into the most trouble is not fearing God, but fearing people.

“The fear of man lays a snare” (Prov. 29:25 ESV). That is the fear that keeps us silent when we would be better off speaking. It’s the fear of women’s committees or going against the grain, and it’s the fear that keeps us from saying what the Holy Spirit prompts us to say because we are afraid of what could happen if we do. The fear of man is the fear we are all well acquainted with. The fear of looking or sounding stupid and then being dismissed, expelled, shunned. That’s the fear known to every elementary, middle school, and high school student alive. It keeps young men belting their pants below their knees and propels young girls to make choices they later regret. The fear of man is behind the yes being said to every life-stealing, peer-pressuring, large and small personal death.

fear is an enemy

Fear in its most wicked, powerful form cripples our souls and warps the very fabric of our true hearts. It reshapes our inner reality until we bear no resemblance to the dream that is us, to who we really are. And our lives bear no resemblance to the lives we are meant to be living. Fear robs us of our very selves.

Ultimately, fear is the domain of Satan and his minions, and it is massively marketable. Horror movies have gone from the semi-innocent days of the first Frankenstein to the cult genre of absolute terror—bloody, gory, and playing on fear. And people love them. They love the rush of feelings they evoke.

The horror DVD is the top choice for many people when it comes to selecting a film.… Perhaps the most obvious reason why horror films are so popular is because people like to watch them at Halloween. At a time when everyone is talking about ghosts, witches and unexplained occurrences, people like to put on a horror DVD and get in the spirit.1

Yes, you can get into the spirit of Halloween by watching a horror movie, but sometimes that spirit gets into you—literally. The Enemy loves to use fear, and you do not want to be opening your life to spirits of fear, for heaven’s sake. Haven’t we enough to deal with? Feeling fear is not a good thing. Yet all of us still have places where fear has a hold on us.

Fear is also defined as “a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, or pain; whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.”2

Others define it this way:

F.E.A.R.: Faith Exits and Runs

F.E.A.R.: Forget Everything and React

Or the ever popular:

F.E.A.R.: False Evidence Appearing Real

Yet often the evidence that appears real is real. There may be a man standing behind the door. There are car accidents. Horrible, tragic things do happen. And you may never see them coming until they are upon you. You know this personally. And you can quickly put two and two together—if such tragedy could befall that family, who knows what could happen to ours? If this bad thing can happen, then that even worse thing could happen too.

We women are fleet of foot when it comes to running down trails of fear and speculation. Really now—you have a recurring headache. How quickly do you jump to, Maybe it’s a brain tumor; maybe I’m dying? Your best friend doesn’t call; several days go by without a call. Do you jump to, She’s mad at me; I offended her; she’s probably talking with someone else now; I’ve been replaced. Most of my friends confess to this. I confess to it!

How in heaven’s name do we keep fear from dominating our lives?

let’s be honest

I am well aware of who I’m speaking to. I know a good many of the stories of the women who will be reading these pages, and I take my shoes off. You who have suffered so much are living proof of the amazing, unsurpassable beauty and goodness, grace and strength, of our God. I don’t mean to be brazen here. I want to be tender with your heart, tender with the story of your life. I just want to be firm, very firm, with fear.

In order to overcome fear, we first have to be honest about life on this planet.

We fear that our marriage will not last. It may not. We fear that we may lose something or someone precious to us, and we may. We fear being embarrassed if we speak up or fall down or come out of the bathroom trailing toilet paper. (A gal I worked with a number of years ago came out of the bathroom with her skirt tucked into her panty hose. She walked by her male boss and several male coworkers before making the discovery. Oh dear. It was so much worse than trailing toilet paper.) Things happen. Little things. Huge things. The truth is, on any given day, we do not know what is coming our way.

Honestly, we live in a world that seems to only be getting worse. We watch the news or walk outside, and it looks as if the world is going to hell on a greased pole. It is sometimes a dangerous, dark place. We are living in a fallen world, and we are women who love. So we are vulnerable. When you love, you are vulnerable to loss, exposure, abandonment, and your worst fears coming true. When you love someone, you risk losing them. You risk enduring every painful thing we’d much rather avoid.

Abandonment

Betrayal

Illness

Death

Sorrow

Grief

Depression

Division

Rejection

And that’s just the short list. We fear failure in life, failure at life. Failure in relationship. Like many women, my deepest fear is that something terrible will happen to my husband or my sons. What is yours?

The hard, true thing about our deepest fears is that what happens is completely out of our control. Life is primarily out of our control. People are out of our control, and certainly their choices are out of our control. There is only one person we can ultimately choose life over fear for. Ourselves.

fear is not our friend

I know fear can be a motivator, like the fear of having no friends who stick around because you realize you can be completely self-centered. That may compel you to learn how to not talk all the time. To ask questions of others. To actually wait and listen to their answers. That’s a good thing. Or you fear you are stuck personally, so you see a counselor, or stuck professionally, so you take a class or seek a mentor. Fear can motivate in good ways like an adrenaline rush causing you to run for safety.

But fear is never a lasting agent of change any more than shame is. It won’t see us through to life on the other side. If unaddressed it will simply attempt to make peace with us. “It’s normal to be afraid of this or that. It’s fine.” Or it will morph, but usually it will spread. Once it has a hold on a certain area of your life, fear will do its best to increase its hold to more places.

You know what we do as women when we feel afraid: we reach for control.

We do it in relationship when we self-protect. But when we choose to protect ourselves in fear and withdraw, we have already lost everything. We are already alone. Self-protecting is not our ally. As Beth Moore said at a conference I attended in 2008, “We can self-protect ourselves right out of our calling.” We can self-protect ourselves right out of our becoming, right out of the will of God. God is a God of love, and we are commanded to love as well. Do not fear! Love!

I’m a mother. My life and my heart are out running around hither and yon completely out of my control. I have risk-taking, adventure-loving, passionate sons who prefer cliff jumping to stamp collecting, motorcycles to minivans, and rock climbing to studying coins. I am pretty aware of the world we live in, both the physical and spiritual realities. I am acquainted with fear. Too many times I have tried to ease my fears by reaching for control over my husband, my sons, and my world. It almost always made things worse.

I got a call from a friend asking me for some advice or at least for my eyes on her relationship with her teenage son. He had recently said to her, “You need to back off.” Her husband later told her, “You basically have your foot on his throat.” She was controlling him. Pushing him to talk. Bringing up the subjects of drugs and alcohol and safety and godliness again and again and again. She wasn’t inviting him to conversation but demanding that he listen. Out of—you guessed it—fear. She wanted to keep him close and safe. It was having the opposite effect. She learned that through her fear-based actions she was pushing him away.

Parameters are good. Conversations are good. Instruction is good. We are right to control our children and teach them about safety and choices and the world in which they live and, as they mature, to give them increasing amounts of freedom. We lengthen the leash that’s attached to our hip and then let it go. And when we can’t do that, the issue is fear. But the deeper issue is trust.

Can we trust our lives, our futures, and the lives of those we love to God? Can we trust a God we can’t control? Can we trust this God whose take on life and death and suffering and joy is so very different from our own?

Yes. Yes, we can.

Because we know him. And we know he is good.

only love

We have fears below the surface that we don’t consciously know we have. God wants us to be free of them. How can we be? Well, he has made a way for us. It is the way of his love. His perfect love for us casts out all fear.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.… There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.… The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:16, 18 NIV 2011)

We have to choose life. Choose risk. Choose love. The only safe place for our hearts is to dive deeply into the magnificent, eternal, ridiculous, overwhelming love that God has for us. His love is the only safety net that will hold. Really, do you have an option? How is that life of fearful control working for you? Better to ask, how is it working for those who have to live with your fearful control? Come and be free in the love of God.

I’m not making idle religious promises here. We do have a couple of guarantees in this life as Christians, but maybe not as many as we would like. Becoming a Christian does not guarantee a painless life. It doesn’t mean that we will be safe from tragedy, loss, or sorrow. But it does mean that in it and through it, we will be all right. Actually we will be much better than all right. Though we don’t have all the control and assurance we may want, we as God’s beloved can be certain of many things.

We can be pretty sure we are going to die. (You may be holding out that Jesus is going to come back before you die, but one way or the other, we are all leaving this place.) The average life span for women in the United States is seventy-eight years. It’s a little less for men. All of us at one time or another are going to leave this world as we know it. We can be sure of that. But we don’t need to fear it because we can be certain of what is coming next. Eternal life is real. Heaven is real. Some of those we love so deeply have already gone on before us, and the pain of losing them is comforted by the fact that we have not lost them forever. We are parted now for a little while. A sweet reunion is coming. We are promised that.

We know that we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. We know that nothing, nothing, nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. All things. Even the other shoe dropping. We are promised that.

We are promised that we will never be alone. Jesus promises that he will never leave us or forsake us or turn his face away no matter what our emotions or circumstances are telling us. And we are promised that we will have everything we need. Everything.

Paul says in Philippians 4:19, “And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.” Our needs won’t be met according to the destitution of the world or to the poverty of our own faith in the moment but according to the riches in Jesus. There’s no one richer than him!

Now, I admit that what I sincerely believe I need doesn’t always line up with what God believes I need. But all of us have stories of God coming through when we needed him most. From groceries left on my doorstep, to an anonymous gift of twenty dollars that allowed me to put gas in my car, to the tuition for college supplied on the date it was due, I have amazing stories.

Our God is the God of last-minute deliverances. But his view is different from ours. Jeremiah was set apart in his mother’s womb to be a prophet and told by God not to fear: “‘They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you,’ declares the LORD” (Jer. 1:19).

That promise was fulfilled many times in the biblical narrative. But Jeremiah was attacked by his own brothers, beaten and put into the stocks by a priest and false prophet, imprisoned by the king, threatened with death, thrown into a cistern by Judah’s officials, and opposed by a false prophet.

Ummmm. When did God rescue him exactly? After he was beaten. After he was imprisoned. After he was threatened, opposed, and thrown into a cistern. Yes, God’s view is dramatically different from ours. Jeremiah went through much travail. So has every saint before him and after him, though not all to that extreme. And regardless of what comes our way, God tells all of us, “Don’t be afraid.” He says, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

A friend recently shared this wisdom: “Love displaces fear, so in order to truly become so fearless that you can live out the way of life God has for you, you will have to become so immersed in the presence of love that there is no room for fear. Courage comes from love, never from fear.”

We want to be women who advance. The kingdom of God is advancing, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Don’t you want to advance along with it? Don’t you want to help it to advance? And don’t you want to advance into the deeper realms of the heart of God? Advance into more healing, more deliverance, more intimacy, more life? Fear makes us retreat. Love causes us to advance.

don’t be afraid

I love the story of Jairus and Jesus found in Mark 5. Jesus had just crossed over the lake, and Jairus—a leader in the synagogue—had gone down to meet him. Actually, he didn’t just go down to meet him; he went down to fall at his feet. He asked Jesus—no, he pleaded with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live” (v. 23). And Jesus, being fully himself, said sure. You remember the story.

Jesus was walking to Jairus’s house, but he didn’t go alone. A crowd went with him. He was being jostled, pushed against, pressed into when suddenly he stopped and asked the seemingly ridiculous question, “Who touched me?”

A woman came forward. She too fell at his feet and told him, the Scriptures say, “the whole truth” (v. 33). She had been bleeding for twelve years. She was getting worse. She had seen every doctor, done every treatment, and spent every dime. She knew only that if she could press through the crowds and even just touch Jesus’s garment, she would be healed.

It was illegal for this woman to be out with the people. She was bleeding. She was unclean. It was against the law that she, a woman, would touch Jesus, a man. But against all the laws and against all the odds, she reached out to Jesus, she pressed into him with everything she had, and she was healed.

And Jesus thought she was awesome. “Your faith has healed you. Go in peace” (v. 34). He recognized her as one of his own. He called her daughter.

Daughter, Jesus recognizes you as well. His face is turned toward you in kind intent. You can come to him with your whole story. Everything you are as a woman and everything you are not. You can bring him your victories and your failures and your fears. He will withhold no good thing from you. He will not turn his face away.

After the woman was healed and went on her joyous way, a servant came to meet Jairus and told him that his daughter had died. “Why bother the teacher anymore?” Jesus turned to Jairus and spoke the very same words he is speaking to us today: “Don’t be afraid; just believe” (v. 36).

In the face of the impossible, Jesus told Jairus (and tells us) to hope. With the words spoken that Jairus’s worst fear had come true, Jesus said, “Don’t give in to fear. You may not see the way, but with me nothing is impossible. I am good. You can trust me.”

Jairus did not leave Jesus then. Jairus continued to press on with him to his home and invited Jesus to his dead daughter’s bedside. Somewhere deep inside Jairus, a spark of hope had flared that even his deepest fear coming true could not quench.

And you know what happened next. Jesus said to the little girl, “Get up.” So she did. Who could possibly resist the call of Jesus?

desire awakens

A couple of years ago on my morning walk and time with God, and after many years of praying for this, I felt the cement blocks of fear I have carried in my heart around the lives of my sons fall off. Just fall off. It was one of those instances when the veil between heaven and earth is so very thin. In those moments, I know the goodness of God, the surety of heaven, the power and authority of being Jesus’s, and in that particular moment, the truth that I had absolutely nothing to fear on behalf of my boys or my husband. Or me. Nothing.

It was such a great feeling.

As soon as the weight came off, where my thoughts went next really surprised me. I felt a freedom to want. The desire to skydive reemerged. That would be awesome. (Where had that gone?) The desire surfaced to ride bikes and climb mountains and have dinner parties and know Jesus like crazy and teach women and speak at arenas and live my life. Fully. With abandon.

I am letting you in on a wonderful secret.

What happens when God comes and releases us from long-held fears or fears that have long held us? What happens when we surrender fear to God and invite his love to overwhelm it? What is on the other side of fear? Is it faith? Yes, but the form it takes is desire. What comes is a surfacing of desire. Or perhaps a resurfacing of desire.

Desires surface that you didn’t even know you had. Freedom rises to embrace your life and live it. I mean really live it. To live unabashedly. Desires rise in your heart for yourself and for others. Desires awaken regarding what you want to offer, do, experience, become. No longer bound by fear, how high can we soar? How deep can we dive? How much delight can we experience? Yes, there will be sorrow too—it’s a part of the deal—but life gets the final word. Life. Life always gets the final word. Every single time. Forever.

Praise the LORD, O my soul;

all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

Praise the LORD, O my soul,

and forget not all his benefits—

who forgives all your sins

and heals all your diseases,

who redeems your life from the pit

and crowns you with love and compassion,

who satisfies your desires with good things

so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. (Ps. 103:1–5)

give your fears to Jesus

Fear is not our ally. It is not our destiny. As Franklin Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The things we fear are in the way of our coming closer to Jesus, receiving his love, and being perfected by his love. We want to allow God to reveal what fears we have that we may not even know we have, and then we want to respond by raising the white flag of surrender. Surrender. Not to the fear. But to God. To his love. To allow his perfect love to cast out fear and then to receive what he desires for us instead.

You probably know what you have been afraid to entrust to God. When we surrender our fear, we are offering it to Jesus. We are saying, “This fear is too much fear for me to bear. I give it to you because I believe you are good and worthy of my trust.” When we actively, by faith, lay down our fears at the feet of Jesus, we pick up his love in return. It is an uneven trade, a heavenly exchange.

This past year was a very difficult one for John and me. We faced a great deal of spiritual attack, and at one point it was so severe I thought John might lose his life. I was afraid. One night John came into the living room and said, “We have got to take this weapon out of the Enemy’s hand. He is using fear against us. Fear about me.” We talked about the passage in Revelation 12 that says the saints overcome the Evil One “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death” (v. 11). No fear—especially about death.

John and I knelt down. We confessed our fears to Jesus. We gave him total control over our lives, including the timing of our deaths. We renounced fear, and we made peace with the fact that our lives are in God’s hands. It was a turning point for us; the fear really lost its brutal grip.

Laying down what we want to protect or are afraid of losing or are terrified we will never have is not the same thing as losing those things. It is surrendering them. It is opening up our clenched hand around them and allowing God access to them and to us. It is actually saying yes to God for them. Yes to his plan. Yes to his way. It is believing that just as his ways are higher than the heavens are above the earth, so his way for the things we fear is higher. This God of ours is a God of life, of goodness. He is the God of the Resurrection. We lay down our fear. We pick up Jesus. He is the only way we can live beyond fear. He is the Way.

Take a moment and in the quiet, think of what it is you fear. Ask God to reveal it to you.

Jesus, would you please reveal to me what I am so afraid of? What or who am I not trusting you with? Just help me picture it, imagine it, see their faces. Lord, I want to trust you. Would you please help me give you my lingering fear? Come for me here, Jesus. Please help me. I need you. In your Name. Amen.

There is no shame here. The places where we still fear are simply the places we have yet to fully receive God’s love. Only by his grace and in his love can we let our fear go. Let go and receive. Receive his dreams. Receive his love. It is an exchange of fear for desire. It is an exchange of death for life.

There is no fear in love. And I can tell you this with certainty: God does not want you to live in fear. And he does want you to live.

Don’t be afraid. Just believe.

notes

1. Derek Both, “Why Horror Films Are So Popular,” ABC Article Directory, www.abcarticledirectory.com/Article/Why-Horror-Films-Are-So-Popular/91442 (accessed August 8, 2012).

2. Dictionary.com, s.v. “fear,” dictionary.reference.com/browse/fear (accessed August 8, 2012).