Fear is a confusing and powerful emotion.  At times, it can paralyze you, taking control of our lives and leading us to a place without hope. If you succumb to that fear, you never experience the true joy of living. Without hope, one becomes despondent and never sees the true nature of God’s mercy nor the sacrifice of Christ’s death. While each of us can be captured by this fear, we fail to accept that the way to overcome it is simply by trusting beyond ourselves.

When you read the title of this piece, the first thing you thought of was a “perceived danger” and not the fear that tells us everything will be ok. As a Catholic and living through a life of many ups and downs, my only fear is that I have lived my life in a way that is pleasing to God.

Fearing bad things makes life impossible because we focus only on what goes wrong. The news of a new child and the death of a grandparent go hand in hand. Life is filled with bad things, and along the way, we come to understand how precious good things are. Living in fear prevents us from enjoying the wonders that surround us every day and from being open to what God asks of us. When you allow yourself to focus on loving God and your neighbor, it is easier to accept the trials and tribulations. Accepting that you have little control of the journey and especially the moment it ends, frees you from fear, but only when your journey includes God.

When fear finds me, I find myself reflecting on Jesus in the garden before His destiny was to be fulfilled. We know He asked that the Father take away this cup, but not my will but Yours. I know that Christ’s connection to us is in His humanity, and I know He understands our fears because He may not have been afraid as we would have been in that moment; He certainly did not want to deal with what was coming. That is human.

What an amazing thing to know. that God sent us a savior, His Son, to experience humanity and know His children better. Why do we allow fear to take hold and bring despair when we know the Creator of the Universe loves us in ways we cannot begin to comprehend? The bad fear prevents us from having a real relationship with God and pulls us away from accepting the gift of Christ’s sacrifice.  Jesus carried the cross for us and died to remove the only fear that truly matters: death without a relationship with God.

Understand that our journey is meant to end, and we have limited time to establish our home in paradise. So much time is wasted living in fear of what will be, waiting for the bad things that happen, and when presented with a way out of despair, we hesitate or even reject the open door to freedom. God offers us a way to live free from the fear of the things to come because with faith we know that with Him everything will be ok. Remember the two rules: love God with all our hearts and our neighbor as ourselves. The rules are not complicated, so allow the good fear to control how you live and not the bad.

Andrej N. Lah