Fear and Faith: Two Sides of the Same Coin
I’ve been contemplating a lot lately about fear: fear over the direction our country seems to be headed, fear of our constitutional rights being taken away, fear of what it will be like to raise children someday if our country continues on the path of self-destruction, fear that life won’t go back to what we call “normal.”
Fear. Fear. Fear.
It can be consuming … but only if you let it. If you think about it, fear is fueled by energy. But on the other hand, so is faith. In a way, fear and faith are the same thing, just directed in completely opposite directions. When you direct your energy or thoughts toward what you don’t want, it creates fear. Faith, on the other hand, is directing your energy toward what you do want. Instead of allowing ourselves to be consumed with worry and directing so much energy toward what we fear, why not direct that same energy toward faith?
Our brains try to distract us from processing the emotion of fear by giving us problems to solve as a decoy. We often use the problems as an excuse not to deal with the underlying fear that is hiding beneath the problem. We often try to solve the problem by asking ourselves, “How am I going to _________ (fill in the blank)?” But in reality, the belief we are harboring deep down is: “I am never going to be able to _________.” Instead of giving in to the fear, we have to take the mystery out of the fear and process our emotions. We have to ask ourselves, “What is the worst possible outcome of that fear coming to life?” We need list the facts of the situation and speak the truth of how we would actually handle it.
The level of your fear is, in some ways, also the same level of your faith. Instead of draining ourselves with fear, we should shift our focus to faith. Faith to keep doing the next right thing. Faith that there is still good in this world. Faith that God’s redemption plan is still unfolding. Faith that we can stand for what is right and fight for truth and justice in our generation.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1, KJV).
By choosing to shift our perspective from fear to faith, and by focusing on what we are grateful for, we begin to develop a powerful antidote to fear. Imagine how incredible one’s life could be if fueled by the energy of faith instead of by fear.
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