Why fear is overrated…
Jan 18th, 2010 by ljkim
One of the most often stated (and most often ignored) commands in the Bible is “do not fear.” And the feeling of fear doesn’t actually help or inform you (contrary to what most people think). To prove the point Seth Godin made these three points somewhere: “[1] Most people are afraid of sharks. [2] Almost no one is afraid of deer. [3] More people are killed every year by deer than by sharks.” And oddly, fear doesn’t make you more careful or give you information on what you need to do – people in dire situations who are overcome with fear often do the WRONG things that put them in greater danger… Fear often makes you fixate on something and keeps you from seeing the big picture. And day to day, our feelings of fear make us suffer many times over even before anything bad ever happens.
How do you overcome your fears? The common sense answer to that is: you get smarter. If you know what to do, you won’t be afraid. A fire fighter who trains and understands the dynamics of a spreading fire will know what to do, and focus on that to keep safe. A pilot who knows how to fly a plane will focus on what to do – there’s no time to be freak out when birds fly into the engine…
But how will you overcome fear in regular life? You can train to fly, train for medical emergencies – you can train for almost any specific thing, but you can’t train for EVERYTHING. In real life, you don’t always know what to do. So how can you be wise enough to not fear? In Proverbs it says, the way you get wisdom is “fear of the Lord.” The basic idea is, this gentle God who loves you and says He would do ANYTHING for your well being – what you need to do is to fear HIM. Fixate on Him. Tremble before His potential to do things you can’t concieve. Because IF you fear God, you won’t fear anything else. If the thing you’re most fearful of, most awed by – the thing you fixate on and worry about is the One who can do anything, and would do anything for you…THEN you’d have nothing to fear from what the world can throw at you.
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