Fear
By Craig D. Lounsbrough To Walk ‘With’ Fear, But Not Live ‘In’ Fear
The Hidden Opportunity in Fear
She walks ‘with’ fear, but she does not live ‘in’ fear. At nineteen, Anna’s story is less a story and more a most wrenching tale penned of blistering heartache, seemingly unscalable disadvantages, improbable misfortune handily spun on the loom of all things unjust, and hope ground to powder only to be blown away on the ever-restless winds of adversity. She has known nothing other, and she lives presuming that the tale of her life will continue to be penned in similar lines such as these.
In sitting with this delicate but powerful young woman, I have found that Anna has learned that the best way that she could walk ‘with’ fear but not live in ‘it’ was to turn her attention to seeking out and seizing the immense opportunities that lie within it, rather than allowing it to seek out and seize the confidence within her. She discovered that fear animates itself and enlarges its aura sufficiently to keep our focus on fear. That fear stealthily hides its hidden treasures by keeping us fearful and therefore allowing us to see nothing else but fear. And she has discovered that fear is deliberate enough in executing this terribly refined strategy that we become convinced that fear is made up of nothing but fear. Anna admits that she walks ‘with’ fear, but she does not live ‘in’ fear.
Her health is delicately precarious, leaving each moment she lives as a hope but not a promise. Her life is an existence of individual moments lived out with the hope that if enough of them are accumulated and stitched together, they might possibly stretch out into a future. The physical challenges of each day render every tomorrow as something so far away that it may never arrive. And while she wishes that her faith was sufficiently stalwart to thwart all fear of a tomorrow never coming, she is honest enough to admit that such a faith is a work in progress. And so, she walks ‘with’ fear, but she does not live ‘in’ fear. And it is in seizing the good in fear that we beat fear.
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And she is able to walk ‘with’ it but not ‘in’ it because she decided to look beyond the fear to what great good fear can do. Behind the ‘fear of fear’, she has discovered a rich cache of opportunity for improbable growth. That fear is the catalyst for growth, not the opponent of growth. That fear is not the monster that destroys, for that is the distortion that fear lures us into and the tale that frightened people tell of it. That the implicit nature of fear is such that it surgically seeks out the nature of our existence that is contrary to our existence. That behind the facade of fear there is great good. And in the oddity of it all, it is the ‘great good’ encased in fear that, when released, can be a potent solution to that very fear. Therefore, we walk ‘with’ fear as a means of releasing these solutions into our lives so that in time we can walk with the solutions and live without the fear.
