Fear’s Greatest Enemy

2020 has been a great year for me. I know that sentence is odd to read- it felt weird and slightly wrong to type. But it has been.

My (at the time) girlfriend Maya moved to Charlotte and started an internship in the beginning of 2020. Maya and I got engaged in March 2020. As Covid made doing things outside the house nearly impossible, I got to spend an incredible amount of time with my family. And my family got to spend more time with Maya than they ever would have in a “normal” year. Then, in July 2020, I got married. Now, Maya and I both serve at the same church. Many of the most pivotal, significant moments in my life happened in 2020. For that reason, 2020 has been a profoundly good year.

I write that knowing that 2020 has been a hard year for many. I don’t mean to diminish that. I just want to set the scene for the rest of the piece.

Marriage has been, to me, a greater blessing than I even imagined it would be. There is an experience of love, care and closeness that I’ve never had before. There’s a level of being known and knowing of the other person that is incomparable. 2020 has provided incredible blessing.

But, in the middle of all this blessing, to be uncomfortably transparent, I’ve never experienced more fear than I have this year. I had a roughly 3 week period before, during and directly after our wedding where I felt odd, physically. I had some weird symptoms, like a perceived lack of feeling on the right side of my body compared to my left. I had what felt like some mental fogginess. I did exactly what you should never do: I googled my symptoms. And as a result, I genuinely convinced myself that I had a certain degenerative disease.

So, I saw my doctor. She didn’t think there was anything too problematic going on, but she told me that she’d refer me to a neurologist if it’d make me feel better. Never one to sit back, Maya and I went. And I was worried; I had convinced myself I’d hear bad news. Oh, and the doctor I went to happened to be a specialist in the disease I’d talked myself into having.

I shared my symptoms with him, and I also told him that in the past, I had sometimes unintentionally imagined myself experiencing things that I wasn’t actually experiencing (once, when I was 11, my favorite baseball player, David Ortiz, was diagnosed with a heart murmur, and I convinced myself that I had one too). He examined me somewhat extensively, he spoke a sentence I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

I don’t see anything wrong with your brain, but I think you need to take these out of control thoughts really seriously.

It took me going to a brain doctor, and one who specialized in what I’d convinced myself via a WebMD search that I had, to find out that I had nothing wrong with my brain, but I had something very wrong with my mind. Fear had more than a foothold in my mind- it had a stronghold.

And it hasn’t been just health. The reason I went into some degree of depth about the blessing of marriage was to set this up: I consistently fear something happening to my wife. I’m in that headspace to some degree even as I type this. And I’m not fearing rational things; it’s random things. That’s the problem with fear: it isn’t rational. It’s not rooted in reality.

To focus on fear, for even a second, is to fast-forward yourself to a false future full of pain and loss. Which, might I point out, is not only irrational, as that future does not actually exist; it’s also poor use of your time, mental energy, or focus. At this point I should clarify that fear is both a feeling and a focus. While you cannot control existence of the feeling of fear, you do get to decide whether or not you’ll allow it to be the primary subject of your focus. Which brings me to fear’s greatest enemy, and this is of of the most significant things I’ve been growing into in 2020. Fear’s greatest enemy is gratitude.

Fear and gratitude cannot coexist in the same moment, because while fear is trying to draw you forward into a false, dark tomorrow, gratitude roots you in the blessing of today. Gratitude chooses to be thankful for what is, not worried about what might be. And while the future isn’t promised, and though gratitude today doesn’t ensure a perfect tomorrow, it does allow you to fully experience the goodness of the present. Pardon the cliche, but that really is why it’s called the present, by the way: the present is a present.

Let me take you on a quick mental journey: imagine someone walking up to you, greeting you, and handing you the keys to the car (if you’re not a car person, replace keys to a car with shoes, jacket, shirt, house, etc) of your dreams. And there it is: a white Tesla Roadster, right in front of you.

But rather than grabbing the keys, opening the door, and going, you stare at it. Worried. Afraid that you might wreck it on the road. Or get a door nicked in the parking lot. Or that this just might be the one car that came out of the Giga Factory with some kind of fatal flaw. So you stare at it, afraid, instead of fulfilling the purpose for which the gift-giver gave it to you: to enjoy it. To take it out on an open road and blast LANY with the windows down.

John 10:10 says that the thief comes to “steal, kill and destroy.” Isn’t that an apt biography for fear? It steals your joy, kills your peace and destroys your ability to enjoy the blessings God’s given you. But James 1:17 says that “every good and perfect gift is from above.” Your family, friends, spouse, job, income, items- all of it. Good gifts from a good God, meant to be enjoyed.

Gratitude alone unlocks the ability to be present enough in this moment to enjoy the favor found in right now. But not just that; it traces each and every gift to a source greater than luck or good fortune. It traces them to a good and perfect God; a good and perfect God who never changes. So no matter what tomorrow holds, the same God who provided each and every blessing of today will be there with manna for tomorrow.

Listen to Jesus’ words from Matthew 6: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” You are. He’s provided for you up until now, and He won’t stop now. Let gratitude, not fear, frame your life.