You Can’t Follow Fear

So the markets are melting again.  And the economic health of the western world is looking more and more spurious.

Fear’s a big deal.

How much of your life is governed by fear?

• Fear for your kids
• Fear over your finances
• Fear about what will happen if you don’t respond to someone’s criticism
• Fear about who’s leaving your church/company/social circle
• Fear over the implications of your next decision
• Fear about your health

We never really follow people whose fear got the best of them.  Likely because they never lead anywhere worth going.

You can get a temporary following by playing into people’s fears.  It happens all the time.  But it never lasts that long.  Here’s why: you can’t follow fear.

Fear doesn’t know where it’s going.  It only knows where it’s not going.

Courage, on the other hand, knows where it’s going.  It has a destination.  It leads somewhere.  It looks ahead, not back.

Courage and fear know each other well.  Every courageous person I know deals with fear. Courageous people just decide that forward is better than reverse or reaction.  They trust.

It’s intriguing to me that the opening line by virtually every angelic being in the bible to a human is “don’t be afraid”.   I imagine having a supernatural being appear to you would startle you for sure, but there’s got to be something to the fact that God’s first words to his people consistently seem to be “don’t be afraid”.   Maybe this whole thing truly is in his control.

Courage takes a different course than fear:

• It realizes your kids belong to God and the goal is to help them become independent anyway
• It creates a financial plan that while painful in the moment can navigate through tough times
• It realizes there’s truth in every criticism of some kind, but never leaves us stuck licking our wounds
• It focuses on who you’re going to reach, not just who you’re going to keep
• It sees the possibility in your next decision
• It realizes there are things that can kill the body that can’t touch the soul

We live in an era of fear.  What we need right now is courage.

If we really serve a God who can’t be shaken, Christians should be the most courageous and visionary people going.