I have a confession to make. My confession is long overdue, and honestly something that is quite hard for me to admit. It’s not something that I’m proud of, or even something that I really expected to encounter on this journey, but it is something that I am praying through and asking God to help me understand so that with His strength, I can move passed it. The thing that I need to confess to you is my fear.
The most interesting thing about this fear is that it’s taken many different shapes over the past 7 months on this race. It started as one thing, grew into another, and has now become something completely different from where it began. Who knew that such a small, seemingly insignificant, four letter word could take on so many different forms in my life?
I saw it first happen on this journey as the fear that God doesn’t speak to me, or that I don’t hear Him correctly when He does speak. What if I’m hearing Him wrong, or what if I’m really just operating out of my own desires and listening to my own thoughts? I guess another word for that fear would be doubt. I feared (doubted) that I am not worthy enough for Him to speak to. I worked through a lot of that doubt in the first few months and God continues to bring me through it when I feel it start creeping in and hear the guilty one still try to make it right. Once a lot of my doubt was addressed and prayed through, I saw the monster of fear take the form of fearing man. I have always known that I’m a people pleaser; I would say that it is one of the greater struggles in my life. I saw it specifically manifest itself on this race in fearing what people would think of me if I stepped out in faith to pray for miracles or spoke up on my team about things that I saw needing correction or if I went out into the streets to pray for strangers and preach the gospel. I saw myself fearing what others would think of me or how they would react to me if I stood up for what I believed in. I feared what they might think of me if I spoke out to share the name of Jesus with a stranger, or feared rejection from that stranger if they did not accept the message I had to share about Jesus. As I’ve continued to pray against that fear, as I’ve continued to give my desire to please people over to God, I’ve seen Him grow a boldness in me to love those who I’m so concerned with pleasing in a better way; not by being silent, but by speaking up. He’s showing me that to love them means to call them up to be their best, or to know His best, or to encourage them to have faith in the one, true Savior, Jesus Christ. Perfect love casts out fear, and I am not truly loving someone if I am being silent as they suffer through their struggles or hopeless loneliness.
As I continue to fight against the fear of man with boldness and God’s truth, I now stare into the face of a whole new kind of fear that has become very real, specifically this month in India. It seems as though I’ve just won a battle only to be met by a war. Let me explain…..We got to meet a wonderful family here in Kolkata who shared with us the reality that Christians are hated and persecuted in this country. The government has become very strict over the past year, and a lot of missionaries and organizations have been removed because of their Christian affiliations, including the well-known child sponsors, Compassion International. We were told that evangelizing on the streets or in public is very risky and has the potential to get us removed from the country. The fear that preaching the gospel could actually end my time here has overtaken my thoughts and somewhat stopped me from continuing to conquer my fear of man and rejection. Not wanting to jeopardize my organization or my team, I have found myself retreating to stay inside or not speaking to strangers about the love of Jesus. Not knowing how to walk forward in wisdom in order to be ”wise as serpents and innocent as doves’’ (Matthew 10:16) has left me in a place where I am crying out to God to help me navigate through this new form of fear.
The coolest thing I have seen through this whole experience, and the greatest way I have seen God answer my cries is the continued emphasis He has been putting on a specific passage in Ephesians chapter 6. One of the main reasons why I am SO encouraged by His reminder of these verses is because they are the verses with which I started this journey. The last blog post I wrote before leaving the states to come on this race (This is the Day…) shared those verses, with a request that it be your prayer for me over this year. So once again, friends, family and loving supporters…as I continue to fight fear in its many different forms, I ask you all to join me in reading these verses and request that they be your prayer for myself and my squad during our time in India.
”Pray for me also, that WHENEVER I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.’’ (Ephesians 6:19-20)
Reading those verses reminds me that Paul knew every time he went out to preach he risked his life or being thrown in jail…yet he continued to pray for fearlessness. It has been such an encouragement for me to know that when I give my heart to God, when I do what He has called me to do, when I love His people and call upon His name for bold words to preach the gospel, He truly can (and will!) make me FEARLESS.
