Fear Magnified
F.E.A.R. has two meanings: Forget Everything and Run, or Face Everything and Rise. The choice is yours.
UNKNOWN
When living our God-given calling or passion, we’re not immune to the schemes of Satan. After all, the Bible tells us that he is the father of all lies, working diligently to steal our joy. I’ve learned through the years that if we’re doing something that threatens the prince of darkness, you’d better believe we are walking around with a giant target on our backs.
I spoke at a Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS) group recently and mentioned that I struggle with fear. As our morning together ended and ladies began filing out to pick up their children, one mom stopped me. Touching my arm tenderly, she said she couldn’t believe fear was a stronghold for me.
She said, “It seems that you’ve done so many things outside most of our comfort zones that fear doesn’t affect you. Before you admitted that, I figured God asks, and you simply obey. How can you say yes to Him so often and still live in the midst of fear?”
Saying yes to God’s promptings, I explained, has nothing to do with having fear or not—it’s how you respond in that fear. Time and time again, I must make the conscious decision to push fear aside, saying an internal, No! as if it’s a mean bully trying to take me down. I’ve done some big, scary-feeling things through the years, and sometimes it’s not even in those big decisions that the fear takes hold. Often it’s during a normal day. The mundane Tuesday or random afternoon when I’m going about my business and I’m suddenly gripped with anxiety that feels like it’s literally grabbing hold of my heart with talon fingers, squeezing tightly and cutting into me as my thoughts run wild about something that might happen.
I see Satan lurking in the darkness, watching. Waiting for the perfect time to strike. Because he’s spent time observing how we go about our days, he knows where our weaknesses are and how to quickly snatch us.
Though I’d like to declare that we were full of smiles and high fives as we jumped up and said yes to adopting Ezekiel right away, the reality is different. Feeling deeply that Christ was asking us to bring home six-year-old Ezekiel mere months after Imani joined our family sent Ben and me spinning from the bigness of it all, especially because everyone we knew and loved disagreed with what we confidently believed we’d heard God say. Forgetting for a moment that we cannot stay where we are and go with God, our fear outweighed our obedience and we decided to stay safe. Shaking our heads in an emphatic no way, we refused the very God we had previously opened our hands to while pouring out the words, Use me.
Vulnerably pondering whether we believed God would grow us to be the people who could trust Him completely, we examined our hearts. What we found was a worship of contentment and a distaste for discomfort. Holding out our fears and weaknesses to Him to both expose them and ask Him to take them all, we rejoined our God in His adventure.
The first days of settling in with our new little six-year-old son were fun—an adventure, really. Everything was new and exciting with Ezekiel, and he instantly bonded with Anton and Laith. One of my favorite photos of all time is from after dinner the day he came home. We all went for a walk to show him the neighborhood, the boys wanting to point out to their new sibling the deer we’d often come upon. We lived a handful of blocks from a Boy Scout camp, where at least a hundred Bambi look-alikes roamed the grounds. Ezekiel walked between his little brothers, an arm protectively over each of their shoulders. He barely knew these kids, but he’d already claimed them as his own. Precious.
But the transition wasn’t always so idyllic. Bringing a young child from rural Ethiopia to America is like transplanting someone from the eighteenth century into the modern day. He’d never seen an escalator or an elevator, both of which completely confused him. To him, anything electronic was like something from an alien planet. And since Ethiopians eat with their hands, our sweet six-year-old didn’t know how to eat with a fork, knife, or spoon.
All experiences were novel for him. A lot were hilarious to watch him figure out, and it was always amazing to see a child learn things before your eyes.
Never having had access to more than a spigot to wash in, the concept of a shower thrilled Ezekiel. I laughed as we listened to him sing familiar songs from my childhood that he’d learned at the orphanage at the top of his lungs in thickly accented English. The china in the cabinets shook at the heavy thump of his feet as he danced and marched to songs like “I’m in the Lord’s Army (Yes, Sir!)” while giddily splashing around under the warm water.
One morning Ezekiel was showering upstairs as I bathed the younger boys on the first floor. We lived in an older house, whose pipes would creak loudly when both tubs were used at the same time. Suddenly I heard a bloodcurdling scream, the kind no parent expects to hear from their child’s lips. One that stops you cold. I bolted upstairs so fast I don’t even remember how I got there.
As I pulled back the curtain, there crouched Ezekiel in the far corner of the shower, slinking into the tile. Grasping his knees to his chest and rocking back and forth as the shower sprayed his crumpled figure, he looked at me with eyes as big as saucers, almost animal-like noises of terror coming from his small frame. Fear was written on him from head to toe.
I picked up my little boy, whom I still barely knew, and sat on my bed, wrapping a thick, warm towel tightly around his slim body and swaying him in my arms. What on earth…? I thought to myself. I prayed as I spoke quietly to my son, trying to calm him as he shook violently, gulping terrified sobs and struggling to communicate.
Finally, he raised his hands into a gun shape and made machine-gun sounds with his mouth. My heart stopped as I realized that yes, those pipes knocking sounded extremely similar to the sound of a machine gun. Oh, my sweet love. He laid his head on my shoulder as I drew him even closer and cooed gentle encouragement to his scarred heart. I prayed like crazy as my own heart broke that he knew what that sound was. My new son knows the sound of gunfire. And he knows enough of it that it completely terrifies him. Oh Lord, what he’s seen and experienced in his short life.
Ezekiel’s memories, both real and imagined, resulted in fits as fear came randomly. In the in-between times, though, Ben and I loved seeing his joyful spirit as he gleefully enjoyed Anton, Laith, and baby Imani. His laughter was contagious, and it was easy to smile just being in the same room with him.
But then, about three months into Ezekiel’s new life with us, grief and extreme struggle set in. Sadly, San Antonio didn’t have so much as an Ethiopian restaurant, so he was thrown into American life without many reminders of home. Ben often brought our favorite Ethiopian dishes home when he had meetings in Austin, thinking an African feast would be a fun treat for our homesick little boy. But he wouldn’t eat it. We reached out to a friend of my mother, who is from Eritrea and speaks Amharic, one of the languages Ezekiel speaks. But he wouldn’t converse with her. Inadequacy sparked as I fell to my knees asking God how to help him through it all. Fear of failing him, fear of failing as his mom, blazed through me like a quickly spreading wildfire.
We finally concluded someone must have told him not to speak Amharic or to embrace any of his heritage after moving to America, thinking perhaps it would upset us. We’ve since learned some kids are told if they do, they could be sent back. Perhaps, we thought, he feared if he embraced elements from his old life, he wouldn’t be welcomed into his new.
I have been like little Ezekiel. I have hidden the true me, sharing only bits and pieces for fear I wouldn’t be wholly embraced. So often I am gripped with fear at the idea that I’ll be rejected, that I’m not enough: smart enough, pretty enough, or talented enough. I push away taunting whispers that I’m not a good enough mom, wife, or friend—the list goes on and on. I’m sure I’m not alone, that I’m not the only one who has fears that usher themselves in because of deep shame and a panic that people may find out what we’ve done, how we’ve behaved, or what was done to us.
If we don’t rest in the truth of Christ and remember that His perfect love casts out fear, this foreboding and shame roots itself deeply into our hearts. Winding its way around, cinching tighter and tighter, we not only begin to live in that fear, but it quickly consumes us, forcing us to live in a false identity that no one could love us if they knew who we really are. The whole us, we conclude, isn’t someone who could be fully embraced. Fully loved.
The single goal of Satan is for us to forget not just who we are but whose we are. He constantly places fear, shame, and guilt on our shoulders like a heavy quilt, pretending to keep us warm, each block of fabric yet another example of why we’ll never be enough.
What our sweet son would learn is we love him because he is Ezekiel, not because he is perfect. We love him for his past, we love him for who he is now, and we love him for who the Lord will grow him to be in the future. My eyes are opened to the fact that if I love my family in spite of all their flaws, how much more does Christ love me in spite of mine? He is a God full of grace and mercy. His love is a gift that none of us earns. He loves us because it’s in His very nature to love.
“Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”
Matthew 6:34 MSG
Shortly after Laith was born, I began having a strange feeling that we wouldn’t have him for long. Pushing the horrible idea from my thoughts, I ignored it, mentally cataloguing it as hormonal postpartum delusions. Over and over through the years, the premonition strikes, and with it comes an irrational feeling that his life will be cut short. It’s strange at what points my ears tune in to the whisper that something is going to happen to our youngest blondie. It’s not when he’s skiing fearlessly down the Colorado mountains, nor is it when Ben has taken him on dirt-biking weekends. It’s not when he has been so ill his temperature spiked to an unnerving number. Instead, it’s random moments and for seemingly no reason.
This child, whom we long ago nicknamed Crazy Crash, as I mentioned earlier, because of his ability to fall onto his head merely walking across the living room to the kitchen, is constantly full of bruises and cuts. He has broken his arm after falling from monkey bars and had to have a rod placed inside, which caused atrophy to set in and required months of physical therapy to make the now-healed arm strong again. He has split open his head, torn a tendon in his leg after jumping off his brother’s head (I can’t even begin to explain) requiring he wear a boot for many weeks, and been in the hospital for a plethora of other things. After one of his surgeries, a nurse pulled me aside, saying, “God forbid that boy ever gets cancer, but if he did, he’d change the world while beating it.”
Who says that to a mom who is walking, keys in hand, to pull the car around to the front of Children’s Hospital while her preschooler sits in a wheelchair, still fluttering in and out of sleep from anesthesia? Fear seized me when people would say things like this, which, when it came to Laith, was strangely often.
Laith is our sensitive, spiritual one, the kid who taught himself to read before kindergarten so he could read the Bible on his own. He’s the one who teaches me Bible verses and asks me theological questions on the drive to school.
This past summer we had family photos taken at sunset, on a mountaintop near our home. At the end of our shoot, the photographer asked Laith to sit on a boulder overlooking the most beautiful forest clearing, the last rays of light streaking down through moody gray-blue clouds. Motioning that I join my sweet son for a picture, I thought she was testing out the shot and lighting and would ask the rest of the family to join us. As she called, “That’s a wrap!” and we jumped down, she put her arm around Laith and said, “I can tell you and your mom have a special relationship. She’s especially going to want those someday.”
What do you meeeaaan?! I wanted to scream into her face and shake an explanation out of her. My heart ached as either lies or truth—I couldn’t tell which—swelled through me, thinking there must be a connection with this moment and my young son breathing his last breath. What is this, Lord? Is it merely a spirit of fear coming to torment me, or is this truly You preparing me for what seems to be a mother’s worst nightmare?
After internally shrieking in horror of what might be, I hoped to hear a murmured reply from God. Instead, I only heard silence. Of this strange premonition, I still have no answers, aside from the knowledge I need to hold everyone in my life loosely. This does not mean I love them any less fiercely, but that I love them well and with the knowledge that they perceive both my intensely profound love and our heavenly Father’s. He has a plan for Laith’s life just as He does for mine. For now, I choose to let this complex worry serve as a reminder to love God more than my children and to get to a place where I could begin to understand the story of Abraham and Isaac. I choose for it to be a constant reminder that I am an instrument to teach my children how to live an openhanded life, so whether Laith reaches eighty or eighteen, his life will be used for the glory of God.
Every morning before our kids walk out the front door to school, I put my arms around them and pray over each of them. It’s partly because I want to instill a life of prayer into our children, helping each understand we should commune with our Lord throughout the day and at all times. But I also do it because every single day I have to consciously give them back over to God. These bright-eyed cuties are mine to take care of for now, to grow and nurture and love. But they are actually God’s children, and sometimes I hold on to them so tightly that the idea of anything happening to them is too much to bear. Whenever I pray, I try to use the word our rather than my. Lord, thank You for our sweet Imani. It helps me realign myself with the knowledge that they do not belong to me. They are both mine and the Lord’s to love and care for. I need to live an openhanded life, conscious that, yes, I love my children—but if my heart is about to burst with love for them, think how much greater the Lord’s love is for them.
When I was young, a girl in my class was kidnapped on her walk to school. I remember the day like it was yesterday instead of thirty years ago. Because of that day, I have panicked thoughts every time my phone rings on a school morning. It’s the elementary school saying they never made it, I immediately think as my hand shakes while answering. We live about two hundred yards from the path that enters the school grounds and they never walk alone, always with friends and neighbors. But even so, I worry about them every day. Fear that a shooter will enter their campus haunts me many days as well, especially when driving past Columbine High School. I had just graduated high school myself when that horror occurred, and though I lived in a different part of the country and watched it all on television, we now live a handful of miles away. Each time I drive by I’m haunted by the reality that families have experienced the terror I only see in my mind’s eye.
Ezekiel and I were locked up in fear, but faith was the key that let us out. Remembering the story in Mark 9 of the father who brought his son, tormented by an evil spirit, before Jesus to be healed, I brought my son before Him too. In the story, Jesus encouraged the man, saying, “All things are possible for one who believes.’ Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’” (Mark 9:23-24 ESV).
Like the father, I believed and struggled with the conviction that things really would get better. I knew God healed, yet my mind struggled to believe it would happen for us.
After Jesus healed the boy, the disciples came before the Messiah asking why they couldn’t heal him like they’d been able to in the past. Christ shared that “this kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29 NKJV).
I’ve learned that sometimes God does not move until we pray. We see in Scripture that Jesus commands us to call upon Him. Why? Because God has commanded that certain things will only come to pass in response to our prayers. Believing or trusting that He will do something is very different from the actual act of prayer. Armed with this, I prayed and prayed … and after that, I prayed some more. There were times when I didn’t even know what to say, salty tears dripping from my eyes and down my chin. As I tearfully sat in silence before His throne, the Holy Spirit interceded for me (Romans 8:26). With groans too deep for words, time and time again the Lord helped me get out from under this overwhelming fear that consumed me.
I know the Lord protects. I’ve experienced it firsthand in tangible ways when my family lived in Guatemala. Every time I tell people about what our family lived through and witnessed while living there during my junior high years, they’ve got to think I’m making it up.
While we lived in this beautiful, lush, cobblestoned country, guerrilla warfare ran rampant. Many instances we witnessed firsthand. There were several nights when my brother and I would armycrawl in the darkness from our rooms to the other side of our home to my parents’ master bedroom as we heard machine-guns fire close by. We sat under a window (where my parents could sneak peeks outside) in complete silence, knowing our “family plan” and seeing before me the measures my amazing dad would go to protect us.
My dad had been in a SWAT team years before, when we lived in California. He knew what to do to protect his family. He taught us to move quietly in the dark, not wanting to alert anyone that the hangar was inhabited. As mortars exploded on base, I remember seeing their bright-orange fire light up the night sky.
Hand-to-hand combat on the front steps of our home. Gunfire. Running. Shouting.
Like I said, I’ve seen God’s hand of protection firsthand. Many times.
But now that I have a family myself, I have something to lose. And the idea of that grips me.
My all-time favorite passage in the Bible is Psalm 91. Flip open your Bible to it if you’re ever needing a reminder of God’s goodness and protection. I love the imagery that He will cover us with His feathers and under His wings we will find refuge.
And yet even now I struggle. The boys woke early this morning; the snow is thick in the mountains and ski school awaits. They drive away with Ben, and I wave and watch red taillights glow smaller and smaller down our frost-frozen street, then close the door behind me. Praying.
My cousins visited my family in Seattle when I was in high school. Driving through on their way to visit family in California, they stopped for a quick overnight with dinner and fellowship. We laughed; we exchanged stories; we caught up. Oh, such fun.
The next morning after a hot breakfast of Swedish pancakes and milk poured from my grandmother’s porcelain cow-shaped pitcher, hugs were tight all around and again taillights faded down the street.
That was the last time I saw her alive, my sweet cousin, my same age.
A few hours into their drive toward the Golden State and their grandparents’ open arms, a man—still drunk from the night before—changed the family forever. Her brothers, her sister, her mother, all scarred inside and out, hearts still aching all these years later, at the loss of a young life.
When will I experience such evil? When will something horrible happen to my innocent children? To my family? I thought as fears coursed through me.
It was never if. My mind only blared when?
I turned off all news. I no longer turned my knob to the talk radio station I enjoyed in the car. Information of the world around me came to a screeching halt. I couldn’t handle it. My heart couldn’t handle it. Dreams were dark; fears and situations flashed in my mind’s eye during the light of day.
Fear. Such overwhelming fear.
Once again, the Lord drove me to my knees. I needed to get out from under this overwhelming fear that at times consumed me. I prayed for my own struggles, and I prayed for Ezekiel’s. I found strength in the knowledge that we were going through something similar. I could identify with his fears. Though my fear didn’t manifest itself in my sleep and was rather my mind’s eye thinking the worst of the what-ifs, they were still much the same.
I realized something one day, though. Again, learning from the image of the storm:
It’s not the absence of the storms that set us apart. It’s whom we discover in the storm: an unstirred Christ.
Max Lucado16
What is the opposite of faith? Doubt? Skepticism? Distrust? I have come to realize, rather, it is fear.
We need have no fear of someone who loves us perfectly; his perfect love for us eliminates all dread of what he might do to us. If we are afraid, it is for fear of what he might do to us and shows that we are not fully convinced that he really loves us.
1 John 4:18 TLB
As fear sought to dismantle my joy these past few years, I’ve become more determined to stand strong in my faith in Jesus. I’ve decided to refuse to live a life that shatters the promises Christ has given me. I’ve realized I must give it all back to Him, because if I don’t, I’ll completely unravel. Jesus did not die on the cross so I could live a life of timidity and fear. He came so I may have a life abundant, and in that knowledge, I must place my trust.
When getting up each day, I must make the same decision the disciples made as they got up and followed Him, leaving their old lives behind. If I’m going to be used by God to the fullest, I need to make the conscious decision to be raw, authentic, and bold as I also accept Jesus’s invitation to leave the old me behind and become the new creation we learn about in 2 Corinthians 5:17.
Ann Voskamp says, “All fear is but the notion that God’s love ends,” and there is no doubt in my mind that His doesn’t.17 Ever.