Fear

That which we fear will most definitely come upon us. 

When we live in fear, we are exhibiting a form of resistance - - resistance to love, resistance to God.  But we are also resisting the fear of the thing that we fear.

Remember, the universal law that resistance causes persistence?  That is precisely what is in effect here.  Rather than resisting fear, or resisting the fear of a thing, notice your feelings and notice your thoughts when you are feeling fear.  The thing you fear is simply a pattern of thoughts being replayed from the past.  Notice that you have fear.  Notice everything that comes up for you around this fear. 

Another thing to notice about fear is that it is at the root of everything that stops us.  When you feel you can’t ask someone for help, fear is at the root.  Maybe you fear looking bad in that person’s eyes.  Or, maybe you have a fear of not looking good.  Maybe your fear is of someone saying “no.”  Is “no” so harmful?  When you get a “no” from someone, don’t you have exactly what you had before you asked?  Look closely and you will see that nothing has changed for you except now you are left with whatever meaning that you assign to that “no.”  If “no” means rejection to you, then you aren’t simply letting “no” mean “no.”  Fear is at the root.

Getting past fear isn’t always easy.  You first must accept what is so about the situation.  You need to look closely to understand where your fear is coming from.  You need to determine if there is more than one source of fear and get real with yourself rather than making up stories or justifications about why the fear is present.  You must stop hiding your true feelings from yourself if you’re going to get out of fear and into a place that empowers you!

There are two types of fear – authentic and inauthentic.  Authentic fear is in play when you are being faced with real danger.  As an example, you’re out walking by yourself and you have ended up in an unknown area of the city.  It’s dark and you see a stranger approaching you with a gun in his hand.  The type of fear you will be feeling is authentic fear.  You are authentically in danger.  There is something that is happening right now that is placing your life in danger.

Inauthentic fear doesn’t feel any differently to the body.  The feelings you experience may be the same.  But when inauthentic fear is present, you are in no real danger.  For example, you are at work and you have been feeling pressured by your boss to perform at a higher rate.  You have been fired from jobs before.  The economy is rough, jobs are scarce, and you are feeling the fear of losing your job, the fear of not being able to feed your family, and the fear of not looking good in the eyes of your fellow employees, your friends, and your family.  This fear is real.  But it’s inauthentic.  It’s all based on something you believe might happen in your future – not something that is happening right now.

Do you see the difference?

In order to get past the fear and into a place of power, you must get real with yourself about why the fear is present.  Determine if the fear is authentic or inauthentic.  If the fear is inauthentic, just distinguish it for what it is – the fear of something that you’ve determined could happen in your future.  Then, make the conscious choice to replace the fear with love, with trust, and with peace.  You can allow yourself to love and trust that everything will be alright just as easily as you allow yourself to have fear.  It’s simply a matter of choosing to believe different thoughts.

Don’t be fooled by your bodily sensations.  The same feelings you feel when you first fall in love are the same bodily sensations you have when you are afraid of something; butterflies in the stomach, lack of appetite, nervousness, sweaty palms.  The bodily sensations are the same but the value, or assignment of meaning that we give to them differ greatly.  Don’t be swayed by what you feel in your body.  Choose love and faith over fear and you will be able to walk successfully in peace.

Are You Living Your Life or Just Trying to Understand It?

I’m going to make a very bold statement at the beginning of this blog and I hope that I won’t lose you immediately. In fact, I’m going to be making several bold assertions – many of which you may want to disagree with immediately. My request of you is that you stick with me and finish reading the entire blog before weighing in with your judgment and agreement/disagreement.

In our humanity, our predisposition is to immediately judge each thing said, or written, to determine if we agree with it or not. I’m requesting that you set aside that predisposed way of being and take on considering that the possibility of what I’m saying is the truth – not so much as “really, the truth”, but more so just a valid point of view as a powerful place from which to look at something. Just be willing to consider that anything written here could be true and suspend judgment until after you have read the complete blog.

In life, understanding is the booby prize.

Both “understanding” and “beliefs” are barriers to our freedom. The problem is, we can be going along living our lives, but as soon as we switch over into an analytical mode concerning our lives, in that instant, we are failing to live. You see, living is an experiential thing. Living requires interaction, feeling, movement, and always, always being present. That’s the part that gets us every time – that “always being present” thing!

Those of you who have had supernatural experiences will be able to get this concept rather quickly. You had an experience. And, work as best you can, you can try to relay that experience to someone else. But, in all of your explanation, the person to whom you’re relaying your experience will never experience that same experience in your sharing it. At best, that person may have had a previous similar experience and be able to comprehend what you are sharing due to likening his experience to yours.

The subject of Life doesn’t lend itself well to academia. We try to make it fit. We can come very close with the sciences of biology, physiology, anatomy, chemistry, quantum physics, etc. But, each of these only draw parts of a picture – one that must be completed by adding each of the other parts and then you’re still absent some things. No matter how hard we try, we can explain life but only in terms of providing relational understanding to another – never experience.

We could use the analogy of a road map. I can draw for you (or at least make a good attempt at doing so) a map of the city in which I live. I can show you on the map where it is that my house is located. I can show you where on the map you could go to find particular places of interest. I can show you on the map where you will run into the ocean or the bay and I can show you where you will find mountains and beaches and parks. But in all of my demonstrations, you can’t actually get anywhere by sitting behind the wheel of your car and driving onto my map! My map, is only that; it’s just a map, a blueprint. It’s a representation of what exists but it isn’t a collection of the actual things that exist. You can’t actually visit me at my home by standing on a particular location on the map! We can agree that would be ludicrous. And, yet, that’s much of how we attempt to “live” our lives.

You see, a man may have a belief about the type of job he should have, how he should act once he has the job, where his job should be located, what will be expected of him, etc. But his belief will actually prevent him from experiencing that job once he gets it. Instead, he will be living his “belief” and dealing with how things are as compared to how they should be based on his belief. His belief about the job will totally destroy his ability to experience the job unless he chooses to abandon his beliefs about his job and simply experience his job exactly for what it is and exactly for what it isn’t!

So, in a nutshell, I’m asserting that having a belief in God, kills God. You might argue that one must believe that there is a God in order to experience God. I’m asserting that you must not have beliefs about God if you are to ever experience Him. [Please note the difference. It’s not the believing in God that causes the problem. It’s your beliefs about God that can interfere with your actual experience(s) of Him.] Do you believe in human beings? (I’m assuming that you answered that question affirmatively.) The thing is, you’ve experienced human beings directly – you know them and you know that they exist. Therefore, your beliefs about human beings are totally unnecessary.

You can have a belief about God. But, then if you were to experience God; I mean really, really experience Him, you’d probably find it difficult to come up with a single, worthwhile belief about what you’ve experienced. I’m asserting that what you would experience as God would far surpass anything that you could every come up with simply as a belief. Just like a route on a map, a belief may provide you direction to get to somewhere or something, but to actually experience that thing, you must not be tied to the belief – you must only allow it as a pointer.

The greatest roadblock to having the experience of something in our lives is the acquisition of knowledge about that thing.

As an example, the more that you know about God, the less you will be able to experience him. The more insight you have into me, the lesser your experience of me will be – if at all.

I realize that sounds like a bold statement but here’s the thing. As human beings, we want to put things in a box; label things if you will. The more we know about something, the more confined the box gets. We narrow the walls, the ceiling, the width, all in an effort to categorize that thing. In all our work to define and distinguish that thing, what we’re really doing is diminishing it.

As human beings, we listen to others and we view their actions through filters. The filters we listen through are those we put in place based on the information we have acquired about others. For example: if I know from past experience, that my mom has never ventured out into water – whether to swim or boat – I might make that mean that my mother has a fear of water. This could be the case or it might not be. If I don’t ask her, or she doesn’t specifically tell me the reason, all that I know is nothing. What I think I know is simply made up. Yet, because I’ve made up this meaning or story, I listen to my mom through the filter, “my mom doesn’t like water” OR “my mom has a fear of water.” Therefore, when my mom & dad come to visit me on the West Coast, I never schedule any activities around water since I “know” that my mom has a fear of water.

What is true here is that my mom watched her father and brother-in-law both die in a double-drowning in a river where her family was swimming. My mother was four years old at the time. While she never learned to swim, my mom loves to be in and on the water. Does she have some fear around water? Probably. Does it stop her? Definitely not!

What’s in play here is that if I don’t allow people to be who they are, without listening to them through the filters I’ve put in place (or, in other words, without giving up my knowledge and understands and beliefs of them), I will never have the full experience of who they are. Also, my filters won’t allow for people to have room to change or grow. Therefore, I could never experience my mom as someone who enjoys being on the water. In fact, I wouldn’t experience her at all in that capacity. I would only “know” her as the story I invented in my head. My “knowing” will always diminish her and it will entirely prevent me from experiencing her for who she truly is.

Believing that What You Say Will Come to Pass

I have been very privileged to have been deeply schooled in the teachings of faith since 1989 - - both in Christian and secular settings (and taught some about faith even as a child). And, it has occurred to me during this time, that the teachers of faith continually struggle with answering the question of why someone’s faith didn’t work in a particular situation; so much so, that new and revised teachings about what it requires of us to have our faith cause something, have sprung up and have made it even more difficult for people to have their faith manifest as substance.

We’ve now entered an age where the teaching of faith has become pronounced in both the secular and Christian circles. So the use of faith for the Christian purposes of Salvation, healing, and prosperity is essentially the same message of faith that is used in the secular circles.

While the workings of faith, I believe, are truly very simple, it seems that we’ve over-complicated the requirements to have our faith materialize in the physical realm. This should not be so. Faith truly is a simple subject. The Law of Faith is as simplistic as the Law of Gravity. The creator of both laws is the same. God created the Law of Gravity, the Law of Relativity, the Law of Love, and the Law of Faith. He didn’t stipulate a lot of requirements in order for these laws to work. They are in place in the Universe, just where He placed them, and they are at work whether we believe in them or not.

I believe that the biggest hindrance to our not seeing the physical results of our faith manifest is that we do not have the faith that what WE say will come to pass. That’s right. I said, “What WE say,” not what God or anyone else says. I’m asserting that the degree to which your faith will work is in direct proportion to the degree in which you are in integrity with your word.

Remember, the Law of Faith is summed up in Mark 11:24 (NKJ) which reads, “…whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.” The thing in common in each of the above requirements is YOU. If we understood that our words are as powerful as God’s words were when he created the world, we would not hesitate to use our faith and to manifest great things in our lives. However, we’ve gotten so lackadaisical about the use of our words that we often make promises that we don’t intend to keep. We say things that we don’t mean in order to make others feel good. And, we get really slippery by insinuating our agreement with what others say when we really don’t agree.

All of that amounts to us not being honest with our words. In other words, we’re out of integrity with what we say. If we don’t believe what we are saying on a day-to-day basis, how are we to believe what we say in faith when we’re believing for something?

Are you chronically late? What is your relationship to time? If you promised someone you would call them by a certain time, or that you would pick them up at a certain time, do you call them to inform them that you’re running two minutes late? We don’t hold others to account like that. But, it is what’s required of you if you’re to keep integrity in what you say. If you’re unable to keep a promise, then having integrity that you are your word, would have you contact the person concerned in order to re-promise when you’ll deliver on your word. That’s honoring your word. And when you honor your word, you’re keeping integrity in place!

I truly believe that once we begin to have integrity with our own words, then we will see our faith take hold. Then, what we say will come to pass.