Confession: I have been afraid to write.
This is problematic, as I am obviously a blogger. I also have a mostly written book I sincerely hope to finish and have published.
This fear has been growing throughout the last year. It gnaws at me when I see my computer out of the corner of my eye. It pokes at me when I see other people tweeting links to wonderful posts others have written. It shuts down my thoughts. It keeps my fingers still.
It’s a fear that it won’t be enough. People won’t like what I write. It won’t draw the audience I hope it will. It will sit out there in the open like a sad, unpicked girl at a dance, while the other posts are grabbed by the hand and thrown from partner to partner.
Oh how I hate this fear. I hate the grip it has on my soul. I hate the way fear turns my eyes from God and onto me. I hate that it is a little dictator, barking at me to stay silent, to give up, to step out of the arena because if I can’t be as great as I hope I could be, then I should quit. It says it just isn’t worth it.
I’ve had enough of my little dictator.
I recently took a sabbatical from work, a time when I thought I would write more. Instead, I found God calling me first to wrestle this fear to the ground and give it a good dose of truth. It’s time to take these thoughts captive and make them obedient to Christ.
The truth is that my fear means my eyes are far too much on me. Fear makes me focus on finding my own glory, not His. Fear tells me to hustle for my worth. It demands I build a kingdom for myself, and at the same time tells me I’ll never be able to do it.
Fear loves to dictate the what, the how, the when, the how much, of our lives. It tells us to shut up. It demands that we stop trying. It tells us to shrink back and hang in the shadows of the brave places God calls us to live.
Fear whispers to us, as we stand on the edge of faith, of all that could go wrong. It takes our eyes off God and turns them to the what if’s, and maybe’s, and you’d better not’s, and what will people think’s.
It silences our voices and eventually our hearts.
So this morning I am turning my eyes back to Him.
I read today in Minding Your Emotions, “We handle fear by going from self-made to God-made, from self-important to God-honoring, from self-satisfied to God-soaked, from self-preoccupied to God-dazzled.”
There it is – I go from me to Him. I tell fear the truth that this is God’s kingdom, not mine. I tell it that I don’t have to make a kingdom for myself because this is the place where I’m already valued and free. I tell it that I’m going to step out in faith anyway because it’s not about my glory after all – it’s about His.
He strips fear of its power over us.
I’m asking Him to not let fear be my dictator, but to let His Spirit be my guide.
How is fear your dictator?
Related:
Thanks for having the courage to write this. It’s EXACTLY what I’m feeling. What would happen if I didn’t care who read my words? What if I wrote only for God’s eyes? What if I stopped checking my stats every time I posted on my blog? Not to us, but to God be the glory.