“Fear has very few gradations and it has a
ceiling... This is why we’re able to teach ourselves to confidently give a
speech to 10,000 or make life or death decisions in the battlefield. Fear is
fear, and once we learn to work with it, we can scale the stakes.”
—Seth Godin
Fear can literally be smashed by a
persistent, never say die, attitude. When we refuse fear the power it
insistently foists over us, we learn we can overcome it.
And all of the above is proven by
the fact that we experience fear without scale. Fear is fear and it matters
little the actual fright before us. We experience fear to a similar level
despite the scariness of our situation. There are relatively few exceptions to
this.
We can teach ourselves to endure the
fear, and therefore overcome it.
When Fear Cannot Overcome Us
This is the realisation of the Gospel
way. When we understand what Jesus is saying, that he has already overcome the
world—i.e. all stimuli for fear—in John 16:33, we comprehend that, with fear,
we have both the reason and need to overcome.
If there was no presence of fear
there would be no need of courage to combat the fear.
So the presence of fear means that
God gives us overcoming power. And when we test this power, finding it true, we
find that fear cannot overcome us, unless we let it.
But overcoming fear is not
attacking it, but subsuming it by working with it; we accept it, don’t judge
it, but work with it.
Even when there is evidence that
fear is affecting us it cannot overcome us unless we give into it. We already
have the victory by virtue of the fact we are there battling through the fear.
When we feel such fear, yet we go on stoically and undeterred, not cowered
down, demoralised, nor denying the reality, we refuse to be overcome or
intimidated by this evil present before us.
When we can conceive of the fact
that fear cannot overcome us we understand the basis of victory.
Wherever we have experienced fear
and have not been overcome God has affirmed us as capable of resisting all the evil
that Satan, through our limited flesh, might throw at us.
Just about every reason for
feeling hopeless in life is challenged when we understand this truth: fear cannot
overcome us beyond our minds. The battleground for courage begins in the mind
and is steadied by the heart.
***
Fear is overcome by this simple
truth: where we go on past the fear, working with it in our persistence, we
learn we can do anything life throws at us.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
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