The Biggest Fear I have had has been failure.
The fear of failing has kept me locked up in a world that stresses the passing minutes and hours in urgency, but with none of the confidence or emotional energy to do anything about the tasks piling up around me. For someone who fears rejection, failure, and putting themselves out there, it’s been difficult to try and raise the money needed to be sent out to do this work. Growing up I even had a hard time accepting gifts at Christmas or Birthdays because I was uncomfortable receiving gifts. I distinctly remember never winning a single contest (or even coming in close to the top) for cookie sales in the Girl Scouts because I was too afraid of putting myself out there and asking people to buy cookies (and who on Earth says no to those things??). I was always interested in missions work but I remember senior year of high school choosing to join the Marine Corps instead because YWAM would require fundraising… and that scared me more than months of isolation with screaming drill instructors AND the possibility of going to war! I hope you’re starting to see the context of what I’m going for here: there’s a pattern.
Sleepless Nights
Sleep is something that eluded me for a very long time: like, majority of my enlistment in the Marines. My sleep life and I have always had a love hate relationship: I love when I get to sleep, and I hate when I lie awake till morning perfectly exhausted but so stressed out and literally beyond tired that I end up having one day that lasts two days.
My insomnia was so terrible before training camp last month,because I was so stressed out about the money needed to attend training camp, that it literally took me till this past weekend to recuperate from the fatigue and exhaustion. I was so stressed out about meeting my initial $5k deadline that I couldn’t rest- I HAD to be DOING something! It was exhausting! I thought that if I just kept trying harder I could get the funds needed, but I burned myself out completely in the process! It took me till the last day of training camp before I was able to function enough to engage as well with others as I had wanted to. This week I have my next $10k deadline and I’m trying to remember to rest in the Lord and trust in His provision because He got to me to my last deadline (at the last second, which is my biggest fear regarding His provisions) and I refuse to launch out to do Gods work as a missionary in 3 weeks exhausted and burned out before we’ve even begun. This last week I fasted and asked that God would provide and do what I cannot with this year as a missionary overseas, like provide finances to send me there. The only thing I felt Him ask me to do – was write.
So What Would Keep a Writer From Writing?
My lifetime passion has been the written word. I can express so many thoughts through writing, I can process my thoughts and my perceptions – I can engage the world without the clout that accompanies a busy mind. So, naturally, I have chosen for many years to keep journals. There are seasons of life where I write daily, often multiple times a day! Then there are the seasons of life where the dates between entries go from days apart to months apart… even a year or more before I put that pen to paper again. What sense does that make Brittany? You’re a writer after all- why wouldn’t you be writing? If that’s the thought you have then you’d be 100% on point to ask just that: WHY?
The Mirror. How many times in our individual lives have we looked at the mirror and been shocked by what we see? Displeased? Saddened? Angry, confused, happy or concerned? A mirror provides an accurate, and not always ideal, reflection of what’s going on with our appearances. You can’t lie to a mirror, after all it has seen you not only when you’re done insta-perfecting that face contour makeup or grooming your beard to look perfect- it’s also seen you bleary eyed at 5am with toothpaste dripping out of your mouth with eye-crusties and your hair in 1,000 directions. Mirrors only lie in a funny-house. Writing is my mirror to the inside of me. I can’t hide what I’m really going through or experiencing and feeling from my writing, because everything I try to hide from it manifests in my inability to write about reality accurately- something always gets left out- there is an obvious emptiness.
The Fear of Reflection; The Fear of Rejection
When I look back at my journals I always see a pattern in the missing entries, the seasons of silence; they were the hardest seasons of my life, the times I could not bear to reflect on what I was enduring. They were the seasons of sin, when I knew things weren’t right, but I felt incapable or uninterested in making things right. They were the seasons I could not put the words on paper of what I knew to be true because that would mean I would have to acknowledge what was happening in my life, and then I would be responsible to act on that knowledge… that could mean my life being upturned, all I knew would change. They were the seasons of fear. Fear of change, of hurt, of loneliness, of starting over… fear.
Here I am, writing now. I’ve come to learn the last few months how deeply rooted I’d allowed the false identity of Rejection to become in my life. I thought if I wrote it might be received well! After all, I’ve been through so much and seen God work in my life in ways some people will never experience!… orrr… maybe they’d know my past and put me down for stepping out for God after the mistakes I’ve made. Maybe I’ll be rejected because I’m not good enough, and I fail; how can I publicly represent Christ if I’m full of failures? And so the laptop would close, the journal would be put back on my nightstand… the word I had was shelved for another time, a time after I’ll “arrive“. After I’m a good enough Christian to be identified with Christ, and with the other Christians who seem to walk in victory and who just have it all together.
I Can Change
Most of my life I was captivated by the lie that I couldn’t change, even until very recently I thought that I could aspire to be more Christlike all I wanted in my life, I could climb higher, challenge myself more and make changes… and still never change who I am; I felt doomed to be the outcast, the abandoned and rejected, the lonely soul forever watching from the sidelines until I met some unhappy end; the end that might cause people to finally acknowledge I mattered, though too late to assure my tortured heart. That may seem so very dark for a Christian, but it is the reality of what I was walking around wearing around my heart. I thought I was too far gone for Jesus to fix, that everyone else mattered more to God than me, and that the rejection I perceived from people in my life was really a mere reflection of how little God cared about me specifically. [Bull-potatoes, by the way]
After I was saved in the Marine Corps I had a picture above my desk in my office that was from a quote by Amy Carmichael that went like this:
A CUP BRIMFUL OF SWEETNESS CANNOT SPILL A SINGLE DROP OF BITTER WATER, NO MATTER HOW SUDDENLY JARRED.
At training camp this same concept was presented to me in a way I’d never understood before: that someone who does not accept Jesus love for them (which comes with a fullness of the Holy Spirit) cannot pour into the lives of others. If they are jarred then only they and their ugliness will spill out; but if we are filled with the Spirit then when we are jarred the only thing that pours out of us is Jesus love and the Spirit. I realized my heart was full of me and my false identity far more than of accepting and being full with Jesus love for me and the world. My identity had been full of the ugliness of rejection and fear, and far less than of the reckless love of God.
“I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb.
Before you were born I set you apart
and appointed you as my prophet to the nations.”
Jeremiah 1:5 NLT
Fully Known
If any of you haven’t heard the song “Fully Known” by Toryn Wells, then I suggest you pause and open a tab on YouTube and listen to the words of this song as you finish reading this post; it hits the nail on the head. I would encourage you to take some time this week and really get deep into what God says about our identity in Him, it is so important to know our identities because it really influences how we are reaching our world and affects our communion with God and our fellow believers. Read a devotional on Our Identities in Christ! I’ve been reading the book, “UnInvited” and it has rocked me, challenging me to readdress the things in my life that the enemy has used to keep me ineffective and hurting and weak rather than powerful as a daughter of the Great High King. I am now pursuing an identity filled to the brim with the Love of God, I am experiencing freedom I never knew before and I am WRITING again. I want to share Gods goodness and amazing mercies with the world, and no fear can keep me from fulfilling the calling God has placed on my life.
Colossians 2:9-10 New Living Translation (NLT)
For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body. So you also are complete through your union with Christ, who is the head over every ruler and authority.
