I don't often admit to anyone when I'm anxious. It's embarrassing to expose your weakness to everyone. I used to sit in philosophy class, being eaten alive by panic. I have a funny habit of trying to yawn when I'm nervous because it feels like I can't take a deep breath. Once, a professor got mad at me because he thought I wasn't paying attention because I yawned about 50 times in an hour. I've met a few other people who have this problem; maybe you can relate too.
When I was four years old, my mom's sister took her own life. I don't remember much of her, but after she died, my mom was a former shell of herself for about a year. That was the first time I remember feeling fear. The fear of death and loss at four years old. That's why I think I found Jesus so early in life. My aunt Ruth took her life in January, and that Easter Sunday, my mom took me to a church that was having a resurrection play. The man who played Jesus came back from the dead, and I loved that about him. I remember looking at my mom and just saying, "I love him."
She replied, "Who?"
"Jesus," I said. She then asked if I wanted to be saved, and I got saved right there. The memory is so vivid. It's all in full colors in the theater of my mind still 16 years later. After being saved, I dreamed of Jesus and just talked to Him. He was my refuge from the demonic forces of terror that tried to eat at me.
Then, in grade school, I had the irrational fear of choking to death, drowning, or any kind of suffocation really. I have no idea where this fear came from. I've always been a creative person in that way of finding new ways to scare myself. I was so afraid of this that it became hard to eat food my whole fifth-grade year, and I lost a ton of weight, which was not healthy at all. For years, I had so many random fears that just seemed to come and go, bouncing from one thing to the next.
Right after the pandemic, I was told I had PCOS. It was terribly painful and so random that it had just come up all of a sudden after I got COVID. I had so many doctor appointments for it that my new fear became doctors. I had blood taken four times in 2021, and I'm terrified of needles. Every single OBGYN had no answers, so I just had to pray and seek Jesus for comfort. Those were actually spiritually some of the sweetest days of my life. I spent hours before the Lord because He was the only person I could ask for help from. I still have PCOS, but praise Jesus, everything eventually balanced out, and it ended up just being a side effect of having COVID-19.
I lived in Chicago for the last few years and I was always surrounded by people. People were just always everywhere. Then, when I came back to Texas, I found the loneliness to be terrifying. It seemed so foolish; I had always loved being by myself in the past, and now it filled me with such terror. Driving to work filled me with unkept panic. I'm still battling with this fear, waiting for it to pass, but when I was reflecting on this spiritual warfare, I had a realization while reading a book by Sheldon Vanauken.
I've always loved imagining new and beautiful things, but I've come to realize that for every beautiful thing the Lord created, Satan has a demonic counterfeit for it. And the demonic counterfeit of imagination is fear. I've been searching for peace my whole life, but peace isn't the opposite of fear. The opposite of fear is love.
1 John 4:18, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love cast out fear."
Sheldon Vanauken wrote in his memoir, "Goodness and love are as real as their terrible opposites, and in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils like Nazi Germany. But love is the final reality, and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom." (A Severe Mercy, Ch.7).
While on a walk this week, I was reflecting on this. Imagination is a wonderful gift from the Lord. I use imagination to build science fiction worlds and create characters people can enjoy. Imagination lets me dream and make goals for the future. But it's fallen like the rest of the world in which we live. Imagination in its fallen state is fear. Fear seems to be so much stronger than joy and love, but it's not true. Love and grace do not fall as fast as the castles of fear and animosity the world builds. For those who are in Christ, love is the final reality not fear.
