As women, we instinctively understand what it means to fear. We fear that God won’t meet the desires of our heart. We fear being insignificant or ordinary. We fear rejection. We fear cancer stealing our lives or the lives of our loved ones. We fear tragedies and accidents. Fear is our default emotion.
Living abroad, I feared not having adequate medical attention. I feared that I had given up my opportunity to get married by moving to the middle-of-nowhere-China. I feared that I was missing everything back home—my nieces and nephews growing up, friend’s weddings, babies—all of it. I feared I would never fit in anywhere again. That I had lost my sense of home. I feared failure and not being able to tell my supporters that their money was well-spent.
When we become mothers, we board the Fear Train and never seem to be able to get off. With each of my babies, I spent the first year of their lives waking up terrified that I had rolled over them in the night—even when they were asleep in their cribs. When they started walking, I would leap out of bed in at night to prevent them from killing themselves in a multitude of creative ways in my dreams. Night was the time my every fear had its rehearsal.
Fear can consume us and spread like a communicable disease. I witnessed this in China after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. Though we were hundreds of miles from the quake, we felt the earth riot violently and send our buildings swaying as if at sea. And the fear in the weeks following became a sickness. Many students refused to sleep in their dorms and camped outside. Students skipped class. Rumors of aftershocks and reports of the aftermath in Sichuan fed our fears. It was the first time I had experienced the choking power of fear to control en masse.
But God does not intend for fear to consume us…continue reading
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