drifting from fear
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
Philippians 4:6
Hey lovelies! Welcome back to my blog! This week I’m talking about fear.
Now, this blog isn’t focused on worldly fears. I’m not talking about fears of spiders, snakes, wild animals, or whatever y’all are afraid of.
Instead I’m focused on the fears of loneliness, failure, and death.
loneliness
I don’t know about y’all, but my biggest fear is being alone. Bring on all the snakes, spiders, and clowns that you want, but as long as I have a loved one with me, I’ll be just fine.
My fear of loneliness isn’t present when I’m home alone, or when I’m babysitting in a unfamiliar house, or even if I’m in a room full of people i don’t know. Instead, I’m afraid of losing friendships.
I often find this fear being present at school. When someone doesn’t smile at me, or talk to me, or sit with me at lunch, I fall into the mindset that they now hate me or our friendship is over.
This isn’t healthy.
The majority of the time, these people are just having a bad day and they can’t smile at someone else, or they have nothing to talk about.
During these times, it’s important to remember that I’m never lonely. I have a life-long friend to turn to at all times, Jesus!
Scripture tells me to never be anxious and to leave my fear at the cross. Jesus never abandons us, and we are never lonely.
failure
Oh goodness, this fear will forever be present in my life. It sucks to fail.
I’m a major perfectionist. Everything in my life has to be in order. When I don’t make an A on a test that i studied forever for, I immediately fall into the dark mentality of “I’m stupid.” When I mess up a project, or something doesn’t look the way I want, I just choose to never put myself in a situation like that again. I want to give up. I only focus on things that i know i can do perfectly.
Usually when i feel like I failed, my self confidence vanishes. The tall tower of confidence in myself that I once built has been chipped away until there’s almost nothing left.
The biggest place in my life where I feel failure is prayer.
Frankly, I’m bad at prayer. I’ve set up a (once fool-proof) system of asking for forgiveness, reflection on my day, giving thanks, then asking God for what I need or want.
When my prayers aren’t answered the way I want, I consider my prayer to be a failure. Once again, my confidence in myself or my faith is diminished. This can be hard, especially when I’m praying for someone other than myself.
However, this doesn’t mean that I should give up. Ever. Prayer is sooooo important.
I just have to recognize that God will help me and my needs, and that maybe I’m just not seeing his work in the making.
Death
I’m so incredibly lucky that I haven’t experienced much death in my life. But I’m not going to focus on the death of others, I’m going to focus on mine.
I have found that there are three types of death that I will experience/have experienced.
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physical
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moral
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spiritual
physical.
I know that most Christians would say that I shouldn’t fear death, but guys, I do. Death terrifies me. I’m scared of the pain I’ll feel, and I’m afraid of leaving people behind. And I know it’s incredibly selfish because Jesus suffered a terrible death for me, but still. It scares me.
Sure, I’m ecstatic to meet the God I’ve prayed to for so many years, and Christ who I’ve honored and loved for my whole life.
But knowing that I’m leaving people behind, (perhaps without telling them I loved them) terrifies me.
moral.
Okay, I’m terrified of the day that will come along where I will leave my morals and standards behind. Though I hope it won’t happen, I fear that it will.
Sometimes i feel like my morals are as low as they can get, but I know deep down that things can get worse, and I pray constantly for that to never happen.
spiritual.
I’ll tell y’all now, I’ve experienced a spiritual death before. Several times, actually. And I’m not talking about my soul leaving my body. I’m talking about losing my faith in God completely.
Sometimes it can last for hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks.
Luckily, I always find my way back.
But I fear the day that I won’t.
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Okay, now that I’ve discussed my three types of death, I want to tell y’all what I’ve learned on how to get over it.
Psalms 118: 6 says
The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me?
But I’ve scratched that last part and changed it to this:
The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid.
What can death do to me?
With God on our side, death shouldn’t be scary. And one day we will learn that.
Thank you so much for reading this far. I hope that I’ve helped you with drifting from fear, at least just a little bit. I’m praying for you.