Good Saturday morning! The snow covered ground and low clouds made for one bright night. The roaring of the furnace covers most noises from outside, not that many people are up and about yet on a Saturday morning. Our town is hosting a basketball tournament this weekend. I don't know how many of the expected 3,000 persons have showed up, but I will stay home and write or de-clutter today. The cats are in cold weather mode which means that hours go by without much going on out in the living room. It gets kind of peaceful around here during snow days. Until the day comes when the cabin fever sets in and all of us start going a little nuts. We haven't had it bad this year. The snow has come and gone for the most part within a few days. We have enjoyed short breaks from the windy days every now and then. Some warmer days have broken up the cold this year. Not too bad really. Of course, my hate part of the love/hate relationship I have with winter will soon arrive. March is always that month when a hint or two of spring arrives between the cold spells. The winter has gone on for long enough in my mind, but the spring snows may come and the wind certainly will. However, today is still February and we are not to borrow trouble from tomorrow.
Taking out a loan of possible trouble from the future is one of an anxious person's most common activities. There is nothing quite so disabling as thinking about the many potential problems any given future condition might cause. Few of these potential troubles are even likely, some are downright impossible, but we grab a few off the shelf of our false foreseeing and tremble in fear. Rolling a few anxieties around in the mind can even make a person physically ill. Anxiety likes to team up with its buddies too. Stress, depression, rage... the usual rogue's gallery of bad emotions. When the bad emotions team up to defeat a person, they can usually do a pretty good job. Jesus only had one thing to say about this kind of thinking, and he said it many times - fear not!
The cornered dog is the most dangerous when it fears you. Anxiety is fear borrowed from the future we cannot see. Depression is fear piled on fear bearing us down to the floor. Stress is the fear of losing your job that an employer likes to heap on you, or the fear of performing poorly that we like to heap upon ourselves. Rage can be a reaction to that pile of fear when we throw all that fear into a vat and drink deeply of it. Jesus said, "Fear not!"
It is easy for us to fear many things. The things we fear range from the beast snarling at us in the present to the uncertainty of the future. Some things we fear are completely imaginary, others are all too present in reality. A rattlesnake in front of a person can be dealt with by backing off. The fears that cause us the most damage though are the the ones we make up from our own imaginations. It is hard for our brothers and sisters in Christ to help with something that only happens in our fearful minds. I can't restrain the beast that snaps only in your imagination. You can't stop the tiger that slashes only in my dreams. Both of us can, and do, pray often for our friends in Christ. Prayer doesn't get enough credit in our fight with fear. Oh sure, we pray fervently and with great concentration when the grizzly bear hops out of the bush in front of us and yells, "Boo!" in grizzly bear talk. However, when those daily fears sneak up on us during the quiet times we sometimes forget to pray. We also tend to forget that others may have those same fears and need our prayers as well.
Take a moment to pray for some other person today. There is a pretty good chance that the other person is afraid of something too! Together, let us pray for all of us to obey the command of Jesus and "Fear not!"
Bucky
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