Fear Not

The memory of Light

Chapter 33

December 9

1 Samuel 12: 20-22

"Do not be afraid," Samuel replied. "You have done all this evil; yet do not turn away from the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. Do not turn away after useless idols. They can do you no good, nor can they rescue you, because they are useless. For the sake of His great name the Lord will not reject His people, because the Lord was pleased to make you His own."

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Preface

Samuel reveals a repeating pattern that, generally speaking, people within the faith community tend to follow.

We connect with God in gratitude and love. We live life exemplifying these spiritual values. They serve as an investment, gratitude and love returning a compound interest that develops life to the point of there being far more good than bad. Hardships and challenging events occur at a minimum.

Then we start to forget the reason why life is so good. We begin taking abundance and opportunity for granted. We come to believe that our life conditions result solely from our own personal efforts.

In this forgotten state we transition from being "in" the world to becoming "of" it. Our focus falters, falling from God's light to the world's darkness. Its darkness appears as the "light" of temptation.

Our living example of love and gratitude, of God in and through us, of the light we shine into the world's darkness, begins flickering, like a flashlight with failing batteries. The see-saw of faith and fear begins tipping downward toward the fear side.

Fear tweaks the focus on the lens of our mind's eye, generating a perspective that produces excuses and complaints. Judgements and condemnations begin to bubble up and out of the sewer of the world's subconscious underbelly, more easily and often becoming the thoughts we think. These come to represent our feelings and the actions of our words, representing a "buy in" of the world's belief that ranting and raving from the living-room couch at the TV, or from the car at strangers on the highway somehow help fix the behaviors and things with which we disagree.

Real, solution-oriented actions dry up. Emotional voids, pockets of "feelings of dissatisfaction," open inside us, like canker sores in the mouth. We start to emulate the world's ways of determining what balms to apply in its attempt to treat such sores.

These balms come to serve as our idols: alcohol, drugs, sex, junk food, TV, money... or even the things that otherwise would be benign except for them taking precedence in heart and mind, pushing God to the side. And though these things fail to provide substantive meaning, leaving us feeling hollow following the brief highs experienced by our encounters with them, they lead us (with the manipulations of temporary relief) deeper and deeper into chaos, hardship and pain. And it's from such places within us we more often find ourselves saying and doing the type of things that open us up to attack by those likewise stuck in the dark with us.

In the dark we forget God's light and all He had done for us in the past. This darkness acts as a sort of memory suppressor, inducing spiritual amnesia.

But our soul's memory remains unaffected. It calls out for us to return to the light. But these callings get filtered through our fear, which by this time reigns supreme. And fear mis-interprets the calling, twisting it into cravings that it says only the idols can satiate. But of course these idols, selling themselves as cures, barely achieve the status of a Band-Aid.