Submission by Dr. Glenn Mollette
Life can have some scary moments. We have all been there or may be there at any given time.
Sickness scares us. Dealing with a debilitating illness is scary. Cancer is scary. Heart disease is scary. Dying is scary. We fear having enough food, money, housing, and transportation. We fear what our children might have to face. We can all name numerous fears that most of us share in some way.
Yet we can’t live our lives in fear. Fear immobilizes us. There is no going forward when we are stuck in fear. It’s difficult to get through the day if we are shaking in fear. Fear often prevents us from moving forward in a career, marriage, or even making major purchases. When you look at the cost of buying a new house and committing to a 30-year mortgage to pay for it, it can be scary. Having any kind of surgery can also be daunting.
A certain amount of fear is healthy. The fear of crashing your car and hurting yourself or someone else might prevent you from driving 90 mph. Or maybe you fear the police pulling you over. This is a healthy fear. Fear of diving into shallow water is healthy. You might break your neck, so it’s better to find a safe place to dive if that’s what you want to do. You don’t want to blindly put your hand under a big rock. There might be something there you really don’t want to find. Certain fears are healthy and might prevent us and others from being hurt.
We have to live our lives with common sense and a willingness to trust God in faith. Without faith it is impossible to please God. In the parable of the talents that Jesus told, the first two servants were commended because they increased the talents entrusted to them by their master. The third servant was scolded because he was afraid to invest or increase the worth of his talent. His fear of failure prevented him from trying to increase its worth.
There is some risk in everything. You don’t know for sure what life will bring when you marry, start a business, have a child, or simply drive to the grocery store. If we don’t move forward and try, we will never know.
We have all heard that it’s better to try and fail than to fail without ever trying. If you try, you will at least know. It may be a success or a life-learning experience. We have a lot of those life-learning experiences. Education is seldom cheap.
Today, move forward and keep this in mind: “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Often our biggest enemy is ourselves. We fret, we worry, and we dread. There comes a time when we trust God and move forward.
Feature photo: See page for author, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
