21
Disobey Your Fear

People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it—walk.

—Ayn Rand

Last year, Steve and I needed to make a decision about where to send the twins to elementary school. Our neighborhood public school has a fabulous reputation, is one mile from our house, and is rated a 10 out of 10 in the California public schools. But I was afraid.

Afraid of the unknown, mainly. I grew up very near the neighborhood we now live in, but I did not go to that school, so I didn’t have a lot of context for it. Additionally, many of my friends were putting their kids in other schools, so I was worried about what that would look like for us and for our kids socially.

In his book Integrity, Dr. Henry Cloud introduced a new-to-me definition of the word integrity: “the courage to meet the demands of reality.”1 I have held on to that idea since first reading it.

Not run. Not hide. Not snivel. Not panic. Not freeze. Not escape. But, instead, meet. Show up and be present and meet today, with whatever it holds. Integrate instead of disintegrate.

Life is full of big decisions, moments that create trajectory in a certain direction. Rarely are those decisions and that momentum and that trajectory undoable, but still, we want to make the “right” decision the first time. We want to feel at peace with where we’ve landed and we don’t want to have to go through the pain of undoing something that we’ve done. Right?

So with all this being true, it’s easy to get stuck. I decided to borrow some words from Scripture and turned the whole mess over to God: “I need wisdom, God, so I’m asking for some.”2 And here is the only thing I kept hearing from him: “Leeana, do not make a decision based on fear. Don’t let fear be the impetus. Don’t let fear be your guiding principle. Instead, what decision would you make, Leeana, if you felt perfect freedom?”

I began to think about what I would do if I felt perfect freedom. I learned a lot about who I was trying to please, my own stories I was projecting onto my kids, my assumptions and generalizations, my places of pride. This entire kindergarten decision was also uprooting the reality that I wasn’t sure I could trust my own intuition, which is a disorienting discovery.

Sometimes having the courage to meet the demands of reality means we move forward, even imperfectly, and fight against the temptation to stay stuck. We fight against the wallowing. We fight against the paralysis. We decide to believe we are, in fact, reliable observers in this world. Somehow. Some way.

We get up and brush our teeth. We go for a walk. We take a vitamin. We read one psalm. Or even just one line of one psalm. We say a simple prayer, like, “God, I need you.” We get moving in one way or another. I think this is profound.

We decide that we will have the courage to meet the demands of reality. This is the kind of woman I want to be. One who is not guided by fear. One who does not react to life to appease my fear, but one who acknowledges the fear—welcomes it even—and then moves forward in spite of being afraid.

NPR’s Invisibilia podcast series offered an episode titled “Fearless,” focused on different aspects of the fear experience.3 One of the stories was of a woman who was born with an extremely rare disorder (only four hundred people currently living in the world are known to have this same disorder) that causes calcification of the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that translates fear. So this woman does not and cannot experience fear. She is completely fearless. Neuroscientists have studied her brain for almost thirty years and have found that in the absence of fear, other parts of our brain take over. For example, logic.

When asked what she would do if a car was racing toward her, the woman said she would move out of the way. But she wouldn’t register the experience as negative, painful, or traumatizing in any way. The podcast was trying to argue that perhaps our hypervigilance and our constant worry about danger and threatening situations for ourselves and our loved ones may be somewhat misplaced and unnecessary. Scientists on the episode even went so far as to say that our fear is often activated—through our exposure to horrific stories and events—when we don’t actually need it to be activated. This may be causing life to be more painful than necessary.

The podcast also highlighted the story of a guy who was dealing with a debilitating fear of rejection after his wife left him for another man.4 He decided to face his fear in an attempt to overcome it through a daily exercise of what he called “Rejection Therapy.” Every single day he would approach a stranger with the primary purpose of getting rejected. For example, he would ask a stranger for a ride across town and back. Or he would hand out church tracts in the grocery store. Or he would ask someone if he could have a sip of their drink in a restaurant.

“No.”

“No.”

“NO.”

Every day he would intentionally set out to get rejected in order to get over his fear of rejection. What he noticed is that people were less rejecting than he assumed they’d be, and that he did become—over time—much more confident and less afraid. In the conclusion of the interview he says, “Fear comes mostly from the stories we tell ourselves about the situation we’re in or about other people, and that story becomes a reality for us. We don’t need these stories as much as we think we do.”

He ends with a triumphant, “I disobeyed my fear,” which is such a cool line.

As the time approached for us to make a decision about Luke and Lane’s school, I knew God was right. I needed to make a decision based on freedom and not fear. I needed to disobey my fear. By that time I had toured seven schools, and I needed to summon the courage to meet the demands of our reality.

What would I do if I felt total freedom?

The answer came toward me with ease: I’d choose the public school down the street from our house. And that’s exactly what we did.

Fast-forward to the last month of kindergarten when I was hugging Luke and Lane’s teacher a little too tight at the end-of-the-year open house and whispering “Thank you” in her ear while I cried. She hugged me back, even though I know she thought I was so creepy.

Reflection & Expression

What would I do if I weren’t afraid?

If I felt perfect freedom, what would I do?

For Your Brazen Board

Find an image that portrays freedom to you.