I believe the strength of our faith in God can be directly measured by how often we are terrified. If you don’t get a nauseous, sinking feeling in your stomach from time to time, then maybe you are not exercising your faith enough - and you are probably not growing.
Fear is inevitably the thing that holds most of us back from reaching our potential, or from even trying. This is not really breaking news. There are volumes of self-help books devoted to this subject. When was the last time you actually took a look at your life and assessed the trade-off between indulging your fears and getting something really important accomplished?
I have come to the conclusion that fear and fulfillment often go hand in hand. I imagine there are many people, myself included, who at some point in their lives gave up on a dream because they were just too scared.
I was not raised to face my fears or to even name them, for that matter. Instead, I grew up thinking that fear and discomfort were things I should run away from. Predictably, I often ended up disappointed. My approach during my early adult years went like this: if I wanted something badly enough, I thought I should pray really hard and wait for it to happen. I honestly believed that if something was meant to be, then I really didn’t have to do anything but just wait for God to show up.
Usually nothing happened, and I would chalk it up to “not God’s will” and try to move on to something else. I was very good at over-spiritualizing my disappointments, and of course it allowed me to avoid ever having to take responsibility for anything. Now I know that I’m the one who has to show up.
When I was twenty years old, I had an intense interest in songwriting. I wanted more than anything in the world to sign a publishing contract and have some of my songs recorded by major artists. I knew it was a brutally competitive industry, but many people had told me my songs were pretty good. More importantly, I felt I was “special” and God would make a way for me without much effort on my part. Of course, now I know that there is a name for that: it’s called Delusions of Grandeur, which is basically a mental disorder.
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