On Fear

Opera House Red and that's just her living room walls (until her husband makes her paint it). Kim's got more color in her life than a fruit salad, mixed in glorious chaos with elegance, wit, perseverance and unshakeable conviction. She doesn't like to talk about integrity because she's too busy living it. She's passionate, obstinate, and sometimes sounds like Whoopie Goldberg on truth serum. I've loved her dearly for nearly thirty years. Read her own blog: Mountain Home Companion, but today enjoy her guest post here:

I have spent most of my life consumed by fear. Consumed is a good word for it, because while fear is a good and useful servant, it is a powerful, destructive, overbearing master.

While I tell you my story, I want you to understand that some of the people who inspired great fear in me, might not have done so in another person. It is a quirk of my makeup, and I do not hold other people accountable for making me this way.

I was born with several birth defects. I was born with club feet, cross-eyed and allergic to dairy. As was the custom of the day, I was a bottle baby. I would scream and cry and throw up most of the time. So between my backward shoes, my eye surgeries and my screaming for the first two years of my life, there is no doubt that I was quite difficult, and in no danger of my parents thinking I was perfect.

As I grew older, I became almost obsessive about my “defects.” To this day, I have a thing for shoes, but I can’t bear to wear them once they have stretched to accommodate my non-beautiful feet. In high school I was relieved when tinted lenses were available for my glasses. I thought they might hide my lazy eye. I was teased about my hair as a kid, being called “Bigwig.” I was the founder, and the president of the “Hair Color Of The Month” club. (In my best Infomercial voice) But I wasn’t just the president, I was a client as well. I have been known to go home on my lunch hour and wash and redo my hair.

Do you recognize the feelings of shame? Of feeling that YOU are somehow defective? That God was too busy for you and had some apprentice angel put you together? Do you feel like God allowed you to be somehow less, because He looked at you and knew that YOU were a mistake?

One of my earliest memories is when I was around two years old. My dad was sitting in his chair eating yellow peppers from a jar. I asked him for one, and he handed it to me. Now the rule in our house was “if you take it, you finish it” and I was a rather compliant child, so with tears streaming down my cheeks I continued to eat that hot, hot pepper. My dad, who has a great sense of humor, and loves to laugh, laughed himself silly. I remember trying so hard to please him, but instead he laughed.

We had been married a few years, and I had gotten ready to go out to my mother-in-law’s house. We were quite poor, and I had few clothes, but I had dressed carefully, and had carefully French braided my hair. One careless remark by my husband, and I made him turn the car around so I could change and redo my hair. One silly, thoughtless remark had me in tears.

Do any of you fear being laughed at? Ridiculed? These are powerful fears, and they affect our ability to be natural and spontaneous with people. These fears steal joy.

My father was an only child, raised by distant, severe perfectionist parents. As the son who could never really please, he grew up expecting perfection from himself, and also from his children. Children are utterly incapable of being perfect, and I rather less capable than most.

I was an emotional wreck as a child. I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. At home there was my older brother, who I looked up to and craved his approval. There was my dad, who unwittingly fed my fears with his demand for perfection. At school, I was smart, but not the smartest, and this frustrated me to no end. Only #1 was acceptable, but I could never attain it. I tried to buy children’s affection with gum and notes, but you cannot buy friends. I could not simply have fun and enjoy things. I was the kid who cried in school.

Do you fear rejection? Do you fear that you are unloveable? Do your secretly try to earn the friendship of people?

As I grew older my fears grew deeper, but I was better able to hide them. I could sing in front of a thousand people, but was terrified of looking for a job. I spent my entire senior year looking for a job. I went to school in the morning, and then went job hunting at the mall. Time after time I went from store to store, would take a step over the threshold and freeze. I would look at the clerk behind the counter and think, “They wouldn’t want me.” And I would leave. It was torture.

My fears were mounting, and as time went on, I grew to fear more and more what the future held for me. I was a senior in high school, and soon I would be faced with having to somehow be an adult. I had applied to college and been accepted, but when my financial aid package came back it was $3300 dollars short of what I needed. So no college. I had made no contingency plans. And fear of the future blinded me to other possibilities.

So I did what many young girls do with no future, I got married.

Let me tell you something I’m sure you already know. Marriage and fear do not go well together. Marriage and youth rarely go well together. Marriage and youth and fear are a terrible mix. I was soon drowning in fear, but I expected my new husband to rescue me and to make me feel safe. He expected me to be the person I SEEMED to be, that is, confident and competent. I was neither. Fear had so overwhelmed me that I could barely choose a place for dinner. I felt completely responsible for everything, including the ambiance, the quality and temperature of the food, the service, and the cost. If any of them weren’t just right, I felt like a failure.

Fear was my complete master. Over the next few years it grew worse and worse, until I was in a dreadful state. Fear had me drowning in depression, unable to function, unable to help my children, incapable of being a friend, warping my mind. Fear changes your mind. When you are wrapped in fear your thinking is distorted, seeing lies as truth, and the truth as a lie. I was in the pit of despair. At one point I kept a list of reasons not to kill myself, and each day I would cross one or two off. At one point I had only my daughter and my mom left on the list. I simply could not bear to do that to them. Thank God.

I survived another couple of years like this, sometimes a little better, sometimes worse, but fortunately, the list was no longer required.

I wound up in the emergency room at one point and was told I was THIS CLOSE to being so nutty they’d be forced to keep me. And I’ll never forget the next thing they said. “You have to choose whether you want to be crazy or not.” For the first time I realized I had a choice in the matter. And I decided that if there was a choice, I choose NO. This began my recovery.

I would love to tell you that healing was instantaneous, but it was not. I still had many years ahead of me, both to recognize what the problem was, and then to heal from it. But it started with a choice. And I want you to know that you, too, have a choice. The choice is not to fear or not fear. The choice is to look to God and to begin to face truth as he reveals it to you. I remember telling him that if he was talking in a “still, small voice” that I couldn’t hear him, and to please shout. This was my wrestling with God. I shouted, I cried, I pleaded, I pounded my fists on the dashboard. And then I heard him. I sought help, and let me tell you, God used Christians and non-Christians alike to help me. Each of them helped in small ways to understand what was going on, but none of them ever caught the truth.

They saw a woman living in terror, and assumed that my terror was in response to a real threat—a real danger. Well, I did, too. I left my husband, not once, but twice, in fear for my life. I thought, and my counselors agreed, that I was an abused woman. After all, I needed something to blame all the fear on, didn’t I? And my husband was behaving quite irrationally.

Let me tell you. I was not an abused woman, though I believed I was. I was terrified of my husband, but it was not his fault. I was terrified of making a bad choice. Terrified of his disapproval. Do you have any idea what kind of pressure it puts on a person when every word they speak bruises the hearer? When the slightest displeasure crushes their spirit? I nearly took him on the descent into madness along with me.

It has taken many years with a gracious loving God to free me from the grip of fear. He has shown me gently and slowly what I need to know to overcome fear. Fear had brought me to the brink of insanity and despair and suicide; Love is healing me.

I John 4: 18 says “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. For perfect love casts out fear.”

Chuck Smith “v. 18 If we know how completely God loves us, we don't need to fear. He won't allow anything to take place in our lives which doesn't serve a good purpose.”

I would love to say I never struggle with fear anymore, but now I know how to deal with it. I turn it over to the Lord. I ask him to help me. I call a friend and tell them I need to be reminded of God’s faithfulness, or I review aloud the many things I know God has done, both in Scripture and in my life. My assertion goes something like this:

I trust in the God of Israel, who led his people on dry ground through the
Red Sea and covered his enemies with the waters. I trust the God of Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego, who protected them from even the smell of smoke in the
fiery furnace. I trust the God of Daniel, who shut the mouths of the lions and
kept him safe from harm. I trust in the God of Israel who brought down the walls
of Jericho. I trust in the God of David, who allowed him to slay the giant
Goliath. I trust in the God who took on human flesh and paid all for me. I trust
the God whose stripes heal me.

I believe that God is the same, yesterday, today and forever. I believe that the God who protected Daniel, David, Esther, and Abraham has the same power to protect me. He is completely reliable. His love and care are utterly dependable. Do I understand his ways? Not a chance. Do I believe what he tells me? Yes, I do, though sometimes that is the result of discipline and determination. I say with Job, “though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” And when I wonder why I am going on in the midst of the incomprehensible, I say with Peter, “Lord, where am I going to go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Scripture provides the tools for dealing with fear. Scripture gives us the report of perfect love, the love that casts out fear. Scripture tells us who God is, what he has done and that we can depend on him. This is truly good news!