Fear Makes You Selfish

Fear is a thing, but there's a thing thing about fear. It must be faced and dealt with it or it will deal with you. It will do its work, seeping out like a poison, strangling you and choking those you love in ways you don't see because you're too focused on the hands around your own neck.

When I was a kid, I had one of those big styrofoam airplane models, and we would launch it off the back porch. It was a 747, maybe about 3 feet long, and it came in four big pieces that squeezed together. During one launch, the foam bird took a hard turn and crashed into the earth, snapping a wing. I tried to repair it with super glue, but I quickly learned that super glue dissolves styrofoam. Not only was the plane not fixed well, it never flew the same and wound up in the trash.

Fear is like super-glue on styrofoam. When fear dominates us, we try to hold our life together through control, but it dissolves and destroys what it touches.

In a way, fear is natural. The longer we live, the more we experience and think, "I definitely don't want to ever go through that again." We can probably explain our story to someone and have them say, "I totally understand why you are bothered by those things." But when that fear seeps in deep, when it is not dealt with and becomes our shaping influencer, there's a price that we pay for our illusion of prevention. Fear makes a selfish person. Fear makes a person who cannot see past the prevention of their own pain to the care and needs of those they love most. Fear makes a person who cannot see their abundance of blessings but only what appears to be in jeopardy. Fear has devilish children: control, anger, shame, despair, self-absorption, ingratitude, and blindness.

Comments

Law and Gospel Distinction Example

Below is an example of how the proper distinction between Law and Gospel is both practical and pastoral. Chesterton's quote "We fear men so much because we fear God so little. One fear cures another," is true, for all I understand. I remember reading a whole book on this subject called "When People are Big and God is Small." I was desperate to find a solution to what I was painfully experiencing, which some had diagnosed (and which I self-diagnosed from reading too many internet articles) as "fear of man." I remember as I began reading the book, I was excited. Many things written in the book resonated with me, and I had some hope. But as I approached the end of the book, my countenance and hope had fallen. Why? In retrospect, I believe it's because though I had hoped for a solution, something I can do to change this, to free myself, and the truth is that the book was long on diagnosis and very short on a useful prescripti...

A Tale of Two Stories

Martin Luther, the 16th century German reformer, is one of my heroes. Among many things, Luther taught that there are two fundamental stories in this life: the glory story and the story of the cross. The glory story is the natural story of all of us, fueled by our desire to secure some kind of identity and security and significance for ourselves in the face of what we know is there: our finite limitations and, ultimately, our death. The story of the cross, on the other hand, teaches us that the glory story is essentially a lie. There is no path to self-glory, to self-security. It's a myth, a closed circle that ends in death. In fact, my addiction to my glory story is my real problem. It chains me to myself, curves me inward selfishly. But what the cross story offers us, in our union with Christ, is freedom through death to the glory story and resurrection to the new creation where we now belong to Someone and something bigger t...

An Example

As Christians, we are exhorted to be examples to others. Christian parents teach their children to be examples to others -to younger siblings, to peers in school, etc. But it raises the question... an example of what? "Well, we are to be a light." Okay, I agree. But a light to what? To whom? This needs to be fleshed out a bit more, I think. Otherwise, we can easily run the risk of being an example of something other than we intend. I've talked to young teens who are raised in wonderful Christian families who feel the pressure to be an example to people, and they have struggled because they have thought this means that they never laugh at inappropriate things, they never complain, never show any negative emotions, etc. They almost feel as though they have to be perfect, and while they are very sweet and well-meaning, it can sometimes end in a result they don't want. It can just make peers feel bad. They aren't pointed to Ch...

Mathetes

Search This Blog