When I was growing up, Mr. Billy Daniel had the finest storm house in our community. It was made of reinforced concrete and designed to withstand an F-5 tornado, although Mr. Billy had never heard that particular term used. My father was always a little critical of people who had storm houses. He saw it as a sign of weakness. As proof of that, he often pointed to Mr. John Hadley Oxley who lived down the road from Mr. Billy. John Hadley didn’t have a very good storm house, but he spent most of the spring in it. He only came out on days when the sun was shining and there was no dark cloud on the horizon. I pretended to be as brave as my father, but whenever a dark cloud was approaching our house, I secretly wished that we had a storm house as good as Mr. Billy’s, or least as good as John Hadley’s.
I’m not the only boy who’s ever had a few fears about the weather. A lot of children look for reassurance during stormy weather. I heard about a little boy whose mother was putting him to bed on a stormy night. The boy was protesting and asking his mother if she could stay with him in his room. “No,” she said, “you will be alright. I’ll be in the room right down the hall with your dad.” About that time, the boy’s father passed by the doorway as he made his way to his bedroom. The little boy muttered under his breath, “The big sissy.”
Our adult fears may be different from our childhood fears, but fears dog our path throughout life. They consume enormous amounts of energy and often curtail the kind of fullness of life that God wants us to have.
Things that loom in the future seem so foreboding and threatening. When they actually arrive, they often are not nearly as difficult as we imagined they would be.
Fred Craddock told of spending time on the beach with his family one summer. He wrote, “It was fun to walk out into the waves. These waves would start toward us, high, angry, and threatening, but as they drew near they began to giggle and fall down. By the time they reached us, they had rolled over, so we scratched their soft undersides, and they ran laughing back out to sea.” That’s the way our fears often do.
What we need in order to face our fears is faith. Faith is the antidote for fear. Fear exaggerates threats. Faith puts them in right perspective. The letters of “F-E-A-R” could be seen as an acrostic standing for “False Evidence Appearing Real.” On the other hand, the letters of “F-A-I-T-H” could be seen as an acrostic standing for “Forsaking All I Take Him.” When we take Him, He helps us see things in their correct perspective.
Lloyd John Ogilvie once observed that the most common command in Scripture is “Fear not.” He noted that there are 366 “Fear not” verses in the bible—one for every day of the year, including an extra one for leap year. Why not claim your “fear not” for today?
