Fear Not

The Target of Our Arrows

January 20

Psalm 53:5

But there they are, overwhelmed with dread, where there was nothing to dread.

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Preface

If we're not living faithfully, then we're living fearfully.

Both faith and fear envision a future that doesn't yet exist in the now, and they guide our steps toward it as if it's a foregone conclusion. They're differentiated by feeling. Faith envisions a future for which we become excited. Fear, though, envisions a future that makes us anxious, adding fear to fear.

Faith imagines a future that reflects the building or provision of something of benefit to others and self. Often it's an event or a circumstance never-before created by the faithful person involved. The ways to bring about that which is believed in are numerous, providing choice among avenues. And, when achieved, it's something that has either a unique or rare signature in the world, leaving a meaningful mark.

Faith imaginings will often result from:

1) Gratitude, for overcoming a hardship, inspiring us to empathetically establish a way to either prevent others from having to suffer in the same way, or to help them overcome the challenge as we had;

2) A need, toward providing a solution to a problem that people or the environment regularly encounter; or

3) Inspiration, to lend added support to an already-existent person, platform, service or company, helping ensure that their contribution to society lacks for nothing, or encounters as few interruptions as possible.

Faith, being solution oriented, adds lasting value.

The successful achievement of the thing believed in serves as a catalyst to turn faith into absolute knowing, for that thing. As air becomes moisture, and moisture, through cold, freezes into ice, an idea becomes faith, and faith, through action, solidifies into physical reality.

This process expands faith. By accumulating enough direct experience of shifting faith in a goal to the realization of the goal, we cultivate faith into our default response to new ideas; especially, when their realization would contribute to society. We think, 'Because of God's help, I was able to bring one good idea into reality. So now I know, with His help, there's no reason I can't bring about another.'

Put another way, achievement produces a compounding effect on faith. But we have to see a goal through to its achievement. Only then do we come to connect with the experience of doing so, embedding "seeing it through" inside of us. (If we give up at any point along the way, the only thing this embeds is 'giving up.')

Conversely, making our fears come true also has a compounding effect on fear.

Fear imagines a future of loss or harm to self or others. Anxiety or distress ensues, triggering an irrational, panicked reaction void of any substantive heuristic value. There's no expansive quality to fear, as it's incapable of extending beyond well-being concerns for self. These concerns lack reason, coming, as they do, from base animal instincts; as such, being more robotic in nature, limiting thinking to only one option--the extrication of self from the situation. Consequently, there's no unique or rare signature, leaving, if anything, commonly encountered harms that only over-exaggerated fight, flight or freeze reactions can create.

Fear pollutes the process of future imaginings by stirring in only the worst of past experiences, idolizing these as fortune tellers. Then ego gets involved, demanding to hold onto the past, in order to maintain its weaponization against the present. And, to cater to its need to "be proven correct," it projects the past onto the threat, ensuring the threat and the projection align. Self-fulfilling prophecy ensues. Then the worse-case scenario is brought into reality.