Brave, Anyway

Tag: fear

  • Freedom Thoughts

    Freedom Thoughts

    Today began before the sun fully came up, with loud noises and flashing lights. An ambulance at a neighbor’s house immediately had me praying, and also immediately transported me to the night my Dad died and how the world looked as I arrived at my parents’ house.

    Red flashes. Red is the color of stop. Red is the color of danger. My eyes filled with tears as my heart filled with heaviness.

    And just as quickly as the heaviness came, the urge to choose a direction filled my mind. A deeply ingrained habit, a gift my Dad gave me, to be mindful of the direction of my thoughts and emotions.

    My Dad’s gift came in the form of a book – for me, a life-changing book. I first read Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer as a young adult, when I desperately needed freedom from fear. And although its pages have countless lessons, the most important one for me is this: I am in control of all my thoughts and I choose which thoughts to dwell on and which ones to discard.

    This morning I had a choice to focus on praying for someone else or on sadness, grief, and fear. I chose praying for someone else. But as I’m human and all up in my feelings right now, an hour later and for the rest of the day I was focused on and looking back over my scribblings about fear and progress and the year of freedom.

    When I think back on all the times in my life where fear had the most power, I had at some point made a choice to walk with or in forces that did not embrace light in the same way I did or needed to. For me, freedom is in the light. I am the strongest when I use my free will, my freedom, to choose light. I am the strongest when I surround myself with other people who choose light.

    Are light and love interchangeable here? As in Light and Love? That brings me full circle to Mat Kearney’s Closer to Love, a song that can transport me back to the smells and sounds of CHKD halls just as fast as those lights this morning transported me back to 3 weeks ago.

    She got the call today
    One out of the gray
    And when the smoke cleared
    It took her breath away
    She said she didn’t believe
    It could happen to me
    I guess we’re all one phone call
    From our knees

    But that song and those memories all have a happy ending now. A light associated with them. A love associated with them. A freedom associated with them.

    I’ve been looking for my eagle, a symbol of freedom, and still haven’t seen her since my Dad went to heaven. I think she holds some sort of secret I am supposed to unlock. A behavior I am supposed to learn from. But until I see her, I’m stuck with Google and bird websites to try and figure it out. What I know with certainty so far is this: in order to fly, birds or planes must have a balance of forces. NASA has really complicated ways of explaining this but Toni Morrison says it so simply: You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

  • Fear and Wrinkles

    Fear and Wrinkles

    I spent the first 20 years of my adult life battling fear of one sort or another. What if this, what if that? How can this or that possibly work out? What am I going to do?

    Born in the seventies, my childhood fears were pretty standard for the time: dolls having secret lives as killers, will I have a date for prom, and the Cold War ending in nuclear war. (Whoever designed the drills where kids hid under desks when missiles were on their way to the east coast clearly did not understand science or psychology.)

    As the teen years turned into the adult years fears become a little more “rational.” At least adult fears were about things with some sort of likelihood of happening. By then I knew my face wasn’t going to peel off because of Poltergeists, so fears became about things like loss or failure or physical harm.

    For a while in my early adult years I was irrationally afraid to fly, which was inconvenient and annoying because I flew with some regularity. A couple of scary flights (one when even the flight attendant was praying!) combined with 9/11 had me convinced that I would be on a plane that Karen Black had to save or that careened into the Potomac River.

    By the time something actually scary happened, I was exhausted from dealing with stupid things and found myself in a real struggle to maintain confidence in God and myself. Three things specifically changed the way I think about fears and the way I react when I feel fearful:

    (1) The prayers of others for me.

    (2) Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer

    (3) Revelations about peace.

    I’ve probably read two dozen books about battling fear. I’ve read every scripture about fear. And I’ve heard it all from people and gurus: “if you give fear an inch in one area it’ll take a foot in that and ten others,” “you have to fight fear with faith,” and even “you’re a Christian who knows where she’s going so you have nothing to fear in terms of death.” (Side note: never, ever say the word death to a person telling you they have fear.)

    Those things are all true, but the two things that finally changed my life as it relates to fear are actually about peace. One of the last things Jesus said was that He was leaving us His peace (John 14) – He understood that fear is a part of the world we live in and He knew that peace is one of the things we’d need the most. And secondly, the words of Moses in Exodus: “The Lord shall fight for you and you shall hold on to your peace.”

    He left me peace and it’s my job to not let it go.

    Or, I have peace and I just need to keep hold of it.

    I loathe fear. It leads to bad decisions, stolen time, stolen happiness, failed businesses, broken relationships, goals not reached, and on and on and on. Life wasted. Lives wasted.

    I cannot afford to live in fear any more, regardless of the news or of viruses or of wars or of presidents or of dictators or of sickness or of disappointment. I have to do what I can do – pray, donate, use my voice, wear a mask – and relinquish the rest. I have to hold on to my peace. And maybe if I do that and others do, too, we’ll even be able to help spread some peace.

    I learned this week that some people actually fear wrinkles and aging! So many people, that the fears have names: gerascophobia and rhytiphobia. My first reaction was how ridiculously vain and silly. But they’re really no more silly than the fears I had – all fears are a distraction that prevent us from really living.

    I sometimes wonder where we’d be or what I could have accomplished if I had learned my lesson about focusing on peace instead of fear sooner. Maybe I’d have a lot fewer wrinkles! But those wrinkles are also my reminder that I have laughed way more than I’ve scrunched my face in anger or fear, and that I’ve smiled way more than I’ve frowned.

    About to start a theme park ride, way outside my comfort zone, so I documented what I briefly thought might be the last ever photo of me. More wrinkles coming soon!

  • Climb, Brave Girl

    Many years ago now, I was on an airplane that had some sort of electrical issue during takeoff. Heat and smoke spread a bit up through the cabin and created a panic (probably mostly in me). At this point, I can’t remember if it was a short in a heating component or an AC unit or something, but what I do distinctly remember is that as I started to process my surroundings this one thought kept running through my head over and over and over again.

    Why are we getting further from the ground?

    Why are we getting FURTHER from the ground?

    WHY are we getting further from the ground?

    WHY ARE WE GETTING FURTHER FROM THE GROUND?!

    I just could not wrap my head around why the pilot would continue to climb when there was danger. Didn’t he know there was smoke? Smoke clearly meant there was an issue. I mean, there had to be some little alarm going off up in the cockpit, right? Some annoying noise or blinky light that indicated something was amiss. Smoke indicates fire. And fire means we’re all dead. This is not a scenario with a water landing where I could maybe figure out how to use my seat as a flotation device and *maybe* be the one person in 100 that survives and gets their own lifetime movie. This is fire, and there’s no safety seat for that. Why were we climbing further from the ground?

    The answer was likely the pilot knew it was a containable issue. Fix the unit, send around the drink cart, everyone will be fine. (At least I hope that’s the case – the thought that the pilot knew nothing and just kept obliviously flying is not really an acceptable possibility for the me that regularly flies.)

    But in all sorts of instances, climbing up is a positive game-changer. Pilots climb higher so that they can fly above turbulence. Eagles climb so that they can see and hunt their food, which is sometimes a mile away on the ground or underwater. Leopards will climb trees to rest and eat above ranting hyenas. Zacchaeus climbed a tree so he could take in a view other than a noisy crowd and so he could see Jesus.

    Looking up and going up, instead of looking around and wandering around, is the way out or the way to something better. Golfers hate when their balls land “in the rough” because the taller grass makes play harder – they use a special club to hit the ball up and out of it. At work we say things like “you’re in the weeds,” because we want our peers to stop getting stuck in small details – what we mean is we want them to think bigger than themselves and their current situation as they consider solutions to problems.

    The common theme is easy: change comes when we stop looking around at the view of our noisy, weedy, hungry, rough, turbulent, whiny, combative and confusing surroundings and we instead decide to pursue up. Even if we can’t see what we immediately need, just like a pilot who trusts that sunshine is above the rain clouds, we raise our head above the rough and the weeds and the crowd and the hyenas, and we look in the direction we’re going – UP – and we climb in that direction.

    Up is the way to peace, the way to the food we need to survive, the way to see things differently, and the way to salvation.

    Sometimes you need to go higher to see things as they really are. The world is pretty big and the higher we climb above the mud and the muck and the selfishness of our own lives, the more we realize that we are a very tiny minuscule part of the world. And that each day and each hour and each setback and each horrible person and each car that cuts us off in traffic is really just a very tiny minuscule small part of our lives.

    When we’re in the storm or the weeds or the rough or the crowd, we can’t even see all the things contributing to our situation. We can’t see all of our surroundings. We can’t see how big the storm is. We can’t see how close our salvation may actually be.

    We don’t have real fuller perspective until we go high. And you know what else happens once we go high? It’s not just perspective that we gain. It’s speed. Planes travel faster at higher altitudes. Our fuller perspective allows us to more quickly understand what’s happening and why, and it allows us to progress more quickly toward the healing or salvation or food or peace that we need.

    I used to be scared to fly. When I say scared, I really mean terrified. Like, heart beating 130 times per minute, cold sweat, picturing my airplane crashing into the ground in a big ball of fire afraid to fly. I-needed-Xanax-to-fly scared to fly.

    I have no idea when exactly that fear disappeared or why that fear is gone. Maybe because I had no choice but to fly regularly regardless of my fear. Maybe because I started trusting my Pilot more. But one day several years ago I found myself not dreading flying, and then on another day I found myself actually enjoying it. I can even sleep on an airplane now and it’s absolutely awesome to enjoy a nap while someone else does all the work to get me where I need to be.

    I mostly write or read now when I fly. It’s uninterrupted quiet time, and I don’t get much of that. As I look down at the clouds below me, I am so thankful to be exactly where I am, flying in a beautiful colorful sky. And I am so thankful for the knowledge that the stormy rain, the rough, the crowd, the hyenas, the weeds, and the turbulence are all small from up here, and I can see those things for what they are. They’re all really just noise, designed to steal my peace. It’s my job to hold on to my peace and to stay on course, and from way up here I am reminded that the individual stormy raindrops falling below the clouds I just climbed through are really insignificant in the big scheme of things. Most of those raindrops won’t matter five minutes from now, some won’t matter five months from now, and almost none of them will matter five years from now.

    I just needed to get further from the ground to get that perspective.