Dear Fear,
You raised me when I was young, ran through my family line from my grandfather down like you’re some sort of a family heirloom; trapped me inside the notion that my world had just stopped and my future crushed when my parent passed and many airplanes crashed.
You strutted all over my secure world, made my internal trembled, my external threatened.
You challenged, conditioned and controlled me — but I’m telling you now: I’m so through with you today.
We are breaking up.
You are not welcomed here anymore.
So, why not just up and leave — go and depart, and leave no further residue.
You who appear here and everywhere, you who dominate our newsfeeds, populate our headlines, and flood our air-times; you can no longer steal our inside peace and rock our outside world.
We are looking at you straight in the eye — we will name you one by one so we can nail you one by one.
You may think you can scare us with cancers, contain us with covids, make us cynical with our dreams broken and our futures uncertain, but we’re telling you: you are going down, but we’re rising up.
Though our normal changes and our world halts; though the market plunges and the economy implodes, though the grocery aisles are emptied and significant events are canceled: we are still not giving in.
We’re remaining calm, content, confident so we can be peaceful, practical and purposeful.
We are choosing to believe that God is greater than our circumstances and He’ll pull us through.Tweet
Because this is what you Fears, are all about: you are an enemy lurking around our empty hearts, riding upon our shattered hopes, incubating over our starved imaginations.
You gawked over us in our painful moments to challenge us in our deepest core: Can God be in control when your world’s outta control?
You make us throw our hands up in despair, turn our heads away in frustration, deaden us in deep worries — but you can’t decapitate us.
We’re pulling you down, we’re exposing you, we’re triumphing over you, one layer at a time.
We will choose to worship when the news turn gloomy, praise when the days are dull and dreaded, laugh because faith wears a face, and we know: there’s no reason to fear when God is in control.
We choose to feast on faith and flood our fears with the holy envisioning of a God completely in control; One able and present, a Father who cares, and a Redeemer who loves.
We choose to feast on hope and starve our doubt. We choose to fix our thoughts on God’s greatness and fill our hearts with His goodness. We choose to dance and dream and delight in the One who is our Way Maker, the Slayer of our Goliaths, the Champion of every roaring thug, the Fourth Man in all our hellish infernos and our Rescuer in every flood.
You Fear — are a terrorist.
And you’ve lost your teeth on that Cross.
You can’t silence the song within us, the peans of praise upon us, the joy inside us.
Instead of gravitating towards the world, we will learn to take our cue from the Word.
We will see the sky above and gaze at the oceans ahead, touch the limbs that reaches out to us with every flower that blooms and know — there’s a light breaking through in every darkness and we will surely pull through.
You fear, will not wear us out or weigh us down.
We will grow stronger, stand taller, speak louder.
We will win over you.
Because this is what determines who we are and what we are all about: we will wrestle and we will win.
We will lean hard on Him, look intently at hope, and speak life into death, infuse hope into hopelessness, and be the hands and feet of Love. We will pour praise in every place parched and poor. And we will stay secure knowing: we aren’t under fear anymore when we are in Him.