Don't Run from Fear

I have written in the past about fear. It relates to TRUTH from this standpoint… the basis of FEAR is False Information Appearing Real, so it follows that Truth and Fear are related. The relevance of this is contained in a story I heard recently…

“I went to visit a man named Dick, with my son when he was six. Dick had a dog with him at the door, and the dog looked at my son eyeball to eyeball. This is a giant dog. And I sent my son back to the car to grab something that we had forgotten, and the dog sprung from the door and went loping up behind the six-year-old at his very height with a little low growl.? My son was terrified. Dick leaned out the door and shouted to him, my six-year-old, Son, maybe you better not run. He doesn’t like it when people run away from him. I thought, just walk beside him. You can even put your hand around his neck, you know? God is horrifically dangerous to run away from, and we should be terrified to run away from God, but if we will stay with him, his growl is a growl of our protection, not our destruction. And we can put our arm around his big neck, I guess, to change the imagery.” John Piper?(@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary.

The TRUTH is that we fear that which we do not know or understand. This is true of almost everything in life. We have “flea of fight” mentalities but prefer to flea than to face head-on what we think we fear. We need to grasp fear for what it is, and for what it is not.

Theo Tsaousides Ph.D., puts it this way in his article in Psychology Today, “Fear?can be uncomfortable and crippling. But eliminating it would be the equivalent of taking down your home alarm system because it sometimes makes loud and irritating sounds.

Being fearless doesn’t mean?eliminating?fear. It means knowing how to?leverage?fear and make it work to your advantage. Some fear is healthy and necessary to keep us safe and away from certain circumstances. We need to understand the difference.

Our deepest, darkest, most numbing fears, however, aren’t spiders, rats, or snakes, or scary people, the fear of speaking in front of a crowd, or high places. While they may frighten us, our fear of spiders and such, probably won’t lead us to live a small, insignificant life.?Fear of failure?will. This is our greatest fear because we do not know ourselves. We do not know what we believe, who we are whenever no one is around, what we are capable of, our inter most thoughts, and why we are not accomplishing everything we desire. We do not want to be insignificant, invisible, or unknown. We want to make a difference, live a full life, and have an impact on the world.

We are able to fully leverage fear through discerning and understanding the TRUTH. If we begin to believe the lies that the world tells us, to follow those lies, and run from our fears and the TRUTH, we are doomed to failure. If we fully accept and embrace our fears, we can conquer them and go on to accomplish amazing things. Truth is what we are all seeking in one way or another. Honest and authentic insights about everything in our lives, and how we feel about it, and where it is leading us. Get to the bottom of this, embrace and come to understand your fears, and the pathway forwards will be clear and obvious.