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.
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