The sign has been hanging on my bedroom wall for years...
Let your faith be bigger than your fears.
Time and again I've looked at that little plaque and reminded myself of the truth. And up until quite recently, I felt like I'd gotten a pretty good grip on the fears that have held me captive throughout my life. Armed with new knowledge about myself, brain health, and practical tools for helping my mind and body to be more present and feel safe, I would've told you that my struggles with anxiety and worry had become fairly minimal.
But then I started to notice a fascinating pattern that was starting to form in my life. To understand what and why, I need to back up to a year or so ago. In mid-2024, I felt a huge shift in my relationship with God and my overall healing journey from trauma. I had reached a place where I felt like God was asking me to expand my faith and my trust regarding His plan for my life. I felt a pull I couldn't resist to enter into some deep waters of belief and hope that led eventually to some life-changing spiritual encounters with God that blew my mind. This was uncharted territory for me. I'd always been a person who was willing to explore outside the normal "box" but this was way beyond anything I'd ever experienced before in my faith or otherwise. It was simultaneously stretching and scary. As I dove in more and more, God began to show me more and more of His revelation and character while at the same time, asking me to let go of things that were no longer serving me so that it could make more room for what He wanted to do moving forward.
That was the backdrop headed into 2025 - the year that God promised would be my metaphorical Spring and the year that I began to emerge from my period of inner solitude and retreat and step back into a role of greater personal and public blossoming and service. All throughout this year, the call to go further into the wild and radical call of faith kept drawing me in with God, and He kept blessing and rewarding that faith with more glimpses of His glory and assurances that I was on the right path. Opportunities and experiences and relationships seemed to pop up out of nowhere that I instantly knew were Divine appointments that substantiated this journey and my obedience to step out in trust. Some of them even directly correlated with moments of spiritual insight and prayer that I had encountered with God months or even years before.
Yet... even as I started to live in this place of faith and experience the resulting "peace that passes all understanding," that pattern I mentioned before started to emerge: the greater the spiritual closeness I felt and the more intimately acquainted with the presence and heart of God that I was, the greater the fears, anxiety, and distractions became. Every single time God would show me something fresh and new and personal in my journey, there would inevitably be something a day or week later that would come up that would directly challenge what I'd just encountered... almost like spiritual forces were trying to get me to second-guess, doubt, or question what I knew to be true. My trauma brain that constantly fights with me and tries to get me to come up with worse-case scenarios and solutions to said worse-case scenarios, seemed to go into overdrive. Some days, I could hardly manage and regulate my crazy brain. I struggled as I hadn't in several years prior. It was as though my faith, in some areas, had never been stronger but my fears were equally as big.
I share this with you not to obtain your advice because God and I are gently working through this and I am on the path to peace. Rather, I share this because maybe you've been in the same boat. We can say that we believe our faith should be bigger than our fears but the truth is, sometimes those fears seem pretty dominate and strong. The thing about fear is that there's often a shred of truth in the scenario or concern that gives it just enough plausibility that it seems believable. Throw in some past experiences with a similar situation and you bring that worry forward and think, Why couldn't it happen again? I've been there many times. Quite a bit recently, I might add.
But here's the equally true thing about faith: when you take the plunge with God and go all-in, you are giving up your rights to know and understand. You are! You are entrusting your story to the caring hands of a capable Sovereign and surrendering to the fact that because He knows, that is enough. You are releasing your control over to the One who holds the universe together and coming into agreement with Him. You arrive at a place where His presence is more important than His answers or His solutions. This automatically puts you in a space where you are walking into unknowns almost daily. You are encountering situations that test your trust in Him all the time. And that pull to take the control back or to demand a particular answer or outcome from God is all too real.
Many of us think that following God will simply our lives and make them easier. I guess one could make a case that doing life with Him does bring meaning and purpose and a lot of other helpful things that do make life better on some level. Yet the reality is that walking with Him will also complicate things from a human perspective. It will make it harder because you aren't just doing life and making choices and living according to how you want anymore - you are turning over all those responsibilities to Him and simply saying yes. It means that you will inevitably walk through situations that you don't understand or can't see the way forward and the only thing you can hold onto is the Hand that is leading you through.
So what has been the thing that's allowed me to gather up all these crazy thoughts and fears and hand them over to God as I keep walking toward the hope that is Him in all my tomorrows? I take those things captive and I tell them the truth. I circle back to what I know God has said, to the moments of insight I've had, and to the faithfulness that's followed me always and given me strength even when life appeared to go sideways. I replace those thoughts with something that's true and certain, and I remind myself that anything that comes my way has already passed through the hands of God and will only come to me with good in mind. I have nothing to be afraid of, even though the fears are very much real. And in the moments when I become anxious, I realize I'm simply living in a future reality that doesn't exist and it's time to change the channel on what I'm spending my time thinking about.
What God has said can never be undone and what God has allowed can never be bad for me. That's the reality I choose to live in everyday. As someone close to me recently said, "God has already written our stories. We just get to discover what that looks like." The script is already complete and God has laced mercy throughout every line. It was C.S. Lewis who said it well: "We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us: we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be" and perhaps that's what's keeping some of us from being okay with giving up our need to run the show and our need to know. I have no idea what's ahead. Just in the last several weeks, multiple things have happened in my life (both positive and painful) that were totally unexpected. And I've had to sit with both and accept them as part of God's "best."
Living in what-ifs does me no good; living in the what-is, does.
The story likely will not look anything like we imagined. But it should give us great comfort that the One who always sees things in reverse because He knows "the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:10) has nothing but goodness on the agenda, and we can wholly trust Him. We can take all our worries and lay them in His lap, convinced that He will make good on every promise and finish what He started - always. No matter what happens, we can know that we are always safe and that we are held and loved through it all.
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