Fear, Faith and Fumbling Around

   
It seems that I am always in the company of one of these three F’s. 

I bet that there’s at least 100 books on “how to conquer your fears” and another 100 on “how to live on faith”.  Either I haven’t read the right book or the ones that I read are just wrong, because I spent most of my time just fumbling around through life. 

Everybody will tell you to “face your fears head-on” or “stand up to your fears”.  Then the same people will tell you to “have faith” or “trust in Jesus”.  For 99% of the people out there, you might as well just told them what time it is.  They are too deep in believing their fears to face them and just too afraid to have faith in anything.  They might believe the time of day.

As humans, we are taught fear from birth.  It doesn’t matter what culture you are brought up in, fear is universal.  Your mom taught you not to stick your finger in the electric socket because it would hurt you.  You became afraid.  Even today, you have fears in your life that limit the good things that you could accomplish.  You are afraid to take that unknown step.

Faith could very well be the opposite of fear.  We don’t have enough faith to take that unknown step.  Why don’t we have enough faith?  Fear is deep seated and well learned.  We gain faith simply by having faith.  It’s that simple, but that is exactly what makes it that hard. 

So what do we do?  We just fumble around most of the time.  You see, one of our biggest problems is our prayer life or mostly lack of.  We tend to judge how much faith that we have by our answered prayers.  If we get good answers, we shine with our faith.  If we don’t get an answer or the answer isn’t what we wanted, our faith goes away and is replaced by our fears. 

And I don’t know who taught us to pray, but aren’t we really selfish in most of our prayers.  We go the Lord seeking his favor and wanting things to turn out the way that we want, not seeking God’s will in our lives.  You have to know that 100 years from now, nobody will remember the things that filled your life with fear.  But if we spent our time seeking God’s will, in a hundred years we will be with him throughout eternity.  To prove my point, do you really know anything about the daily fears that encompassed the lives of your great grandparents?  I know that I don’t. 

So here I am fumbling around.  But I guess, no I know, that the answer is in Jesus.  I find great comfort in Jesus; I just forget to go to him a lot of the time.  Faith is such a powerful thing for us.  We can do most anything with faith.  The problem is that after a little success, we start to think it’s by our own doing and we forget Jesus.  Then we start all over. 

I think that this is probably how it will always be for us and our future generations.  And that’s all right.  The greatest among us will not be the ones that have all the fame, the greatest amoung us will be those that live their lives for Jesus. 

I always like to end with a song.  Today’s song is “Jesus is Just Alright” by the Doobie Brothers.  It’s ok, just listen and think about what I said.