You know when you should do something but you don’t want to because your afraid-like have “the talk” with your kid, walk away from a relationship, call the relative you haven’t spoken to in years, or lose the weight. Fear grips us and we get into a committed relationship with procrastination- take her to dinner, and on tropical beach vacations. The next thing you know, years have passed and your still in the same miserable situation.
Fear taunts you into avoiding the conversation, to doubt yourself, to turn a blind eye to his cheating ways, to eat the whole cake. Soon avoidance is your new BFF. Its easy, it becomes routine-until its not.
Fear is choking the life out of you and you can’t breathe. Fear is the reason your not living the life you want, the reason your in the relationship, and why you haven’t started that business, submitted the proposal, or shared your amazing talent with the world.
Over the years I have learned that fear is defined as False Evidence Appearing Real.
A lie. Just some shit your subconscious made up and has on constant replay in your mind and now you believe to be true. What you think you are afraid of is not really what you fear. Your’re really afraid of not being liked, your perfect facade falling away, criticism, that he may really love someone else or that you will die alone. I get that.
The way to get through what you fear is to focus on what is on the other side of that fear. The peace, the deep cleansing breath, the future, or what you want more than what you fear.
What do you want more than what you fear?
Unless your life is in danger (and sometimes not even then) there is nothing to fear.
Let me share with you a story I heard. Last Sunday our pastor retold a story he grew up hearing about his grandfather who was a pastor in a tiny one room church in Ohio during the forties. As the pastor was preaching one Sunday two drunken men with “kitchen butcher knives” burst into the church service wanting to kill the pastor. The deacons wanted to call the police but the pastor said no, he would handle them. The two men waited outside the church for the pastor as the congregation went home. Before leaving the pastor knelt at the alter and prayed asking for protection. The pastor left the church and walked between the two men who never made a single move towards him. That is not even the amazing part of the story.
Later that evening the same two men wielding the knives crashed their car into a transformer and burned to death. Pastor Stanley really had nothing to fear.
Except for crawly things, I don’t fear much. But my biggest fear is dying before my kids are grown. But what gives me permission to scream my best korean “ki-hap” and roundhouse kick fear in the effing face is the faith I have that I’ll be at every karate lesson, volleyball game, and graduation.
Images of college graduations in the distant future are the white hot truth I cling to to get to the other side of fear.
Go kick your fear in the effing face!
