Without question fear is the most debilitating emotion. Regardless of the source for the fear, it is paralyzing. And it impacts every aspect and facet of our life when it emerges. It’s like dark – it totally encompasses everything… until the light appears. And like light and dark, faith and fear can never exist together, simultaneously – they are totally antithetical. And as light consumes dark, faith consumes fear.
How does fear emerge? Sometimes simply, like a bad experience and sometimes more obtuse. When, how does an intense dislike move to hate and then on to fear? And is fear always based on experience? Or… can you fear something that you’ve never experienced? And it is totally impossible to like something you feared? At least I can’t see how. Fear can be both rational and irrational. Fear does not have to be logical. Reason rarely plays a part in fear.
Does the mere possibility of the adverse experience cause fear? Possibly. I do believe that fear is based on loss, or the potentiality for loss – loss of life being the most formidable. I would suspect that the possibility of loss will cause fear to emerge. But I also suspect that much of fear’s expectation never occurs. So why do we let fear control us – our thinking and our actions? Probably because one of fear’s greatest advantage is the unknown. And too often we humans tend to see/expect the worst.
If we can get beyond the emotions long enough to look at what we are afraid of we often find that either a: it really isn’t as fearful as we initially thought or b: we can develop a defense against the threat or develop a strategy to counteract the problem. Obviously the problem is stopping long enough to control the fear rather than allowing fear to control us. And c: we need to consider what it is we have faith in related to the current problem. Faith really is considerably stronger than fear… remember that mustard seed.
