I stumbled across this old blog from late December 2009 and as is the case with life coming full circle, this is ringing true as I begin 2013. So, I sat down with it and just began to rewrite it, in order to write my way through this thing called fear.
Lately, and more so than normal for me at least, I am finding myself paralyzed by Fear (and that is Fear with a Capital F!). I start writing blogs and the fear stops me. I start sending out resumes (which I hate doing because I loathe working for another boss outside of me and God) to find paid work and fear seeps into even the words of the cover letter (I can see them even if the recipients cannot). I am looking for housing for me and Juno with little resources and even less faith.
I am stricken with, and seemingly addicted to, this ruinous drug called fear.
And it is the Holidaze/HolyDays Season (Christmastide goes well beyond December 25th for those outside the US). This is a time for familes and mine is splintered and fractured by death, time and distance. Mom died in 2008, one of my brothers in 2010 and Christmas without the roots of a mother (for me) is not Christmas at all. I miss my Mom now more than the day she died (June 7, 2008). And at 45 years old, I am fascinated with just how much like a little child I truly feel these days: rootless; a small speck of dust in a big, bad universe; a feeling of being an orphan; ‘feeling’ alone and seemingly unable to simply make ends meet. The list could go on.
I hate grieving during the HolyDays/Holidaze. I use the term HolyDays to imply the Sacredness of this time of year. I use Holidaze to imply the selfish, surface, materialism of this time of year. Feeling sad, grief, bleak and black when all around you there are “signs of Joy and Newness.” It sucks. But I know that regardless of the externals, I am right where I need to be and I am who I am supposed to be: I am held gently in the hands of a Loving God and I am a beloved child of this Living God (that goes for all of YOU as well).
So, the question then begs to be asked and answered: if I truly do see and know that I am a child of the Living God then why does fear even have a place inside me? I thought Perfect Love casts out fear? And that God is Love? But fear persists. The quick answer is I’m human but that does not always cut it for my deep need to analyze the stink out of something.
I read once that FEAR stands for False Evidences Appearing Real (this is the update and this comes from Neale Donald Walsh). I might add that FEAR could stant for many things: Future Expections Assuming Reality. For now either definition will do. I have been in worse places and situations than right now. But unemployment during the HolyDays is a piss-ant way to ‘celebrate’ them. Money issues for me are intimately connected to what the clinicians would call my ‘mother/father’ issues (mom went without for years and my father died poor and penniless living in a Salvation Army shelter in Roanoke, Virginia). You can maybe see where the fears come from…history. But if the past is in truth a stored memory and the future is merely a projected fantasy, then living in the Present moment is the only real solution for in truth Now is the only real moment that exists.
Now is the eternal moment of God and yet in my humanity, I forget and live life in spiritual amnesia: forgetting from Whom I came and to Whom I belong and shall return, namely a tender, loving God who is with me and for me.
But still my humanity persist and I fight it. Their are those who say that what we resists, persists. So I must embrace and bless in loving trust all that is coming my way, all that is coming from within. I pray often, hourly for the Spirit to soften and fill me, to remind that I am “swimming in God” even as I feel like I am drowning. I am praying I can embrace where I am, literally and spiritually. But today, I rant and rage and fight God all the way to surrender, with fear as my untrustworthy guide.
Silly human that I am.
Do you not know? Have you not heard? His name shall be called Immanuel meaning God is with us! Alleluia…
May the icy grip of fear be melted by this Love so warm and so Divine.
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