Fear or Faith?

Fearless? Sometimes...
We've had a great series at church over the last few weeks about fear www.lifechurch.tv . Actually the series has been about being Fearless. 2 Timothy 1:7 (King James Version) 7For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. I have a tendency to be afraid. Afraid of financial trouble, health issues, the perceptions of others, that I'm not a good enough {FILL IN THE BLANK} (Friend, husband, father, Christ Follower, brother, son, employee)…I've found that the stronger my faith, the less my fear. I sometimes forget how much fear has been a part of my life since I was young, and was reminded of that this morning:

Logan (my 7 year old son) watched a movie this week...Spirited Away and was frightened by a character called "No-Face". He did NOT want to go to bed by himself last night. It reminded me of myself when I was that age(ish). I was scared many times at night. I was one of those kids that would pull the covers up over my head and not get up to go to the bathroom until it was light out. I KNEW something was under the bed just waiting to grab me. When I walked into his room this morning at 4:00 am to turn off his light, which I have done a hundred times before without a peep from him, I heard "dad, is that you?" I said "yes Logan"…and he turned and watched me walk down the hall, and back into my room. I noticed that his eyes were like saucers...I wasn't in bed for 25 seconds when I heard the muffled scuffing of feet and a soft voice say "can I sleep with you the rest of the night?"

I remember a house that we lived in when I was young, it was the second home we lived in when we moved to northern Michigan…My parents never had any extra money, so we rented. They rented a house off of Algonquin Trail http://maps.google.com/maps?tab=wl in a tiny city named Mio. The house was redwood sided, and was really meant to be more of a retirement/summer home. I remember many great days there, and at that time my parents were still married.

The yard seemed big to me then, and was well wooded. There were mature oaks that were spaced apart and the back yard had a nice natural canopy of trees, and a fence of bushes and shrubs. There were no houses behind us, and if you walked a straight line, about 100 feet, you would run into water! Jeff and I spent much of that summer playing in Wolf Creek. He would walk across fallen trees and I would wade through the sand-covered bottom looking for frogs and fish. One time, Uncle Oscar came "up" to visit from Sterling Heights (near Detroit) we went exploring for some flowers that he heard grew along creek banks. I still remember all of us taking a bite of a "Jack in the Pulpit" flower http://2bnthewild.com/plants/H46.htm and how it burned our tongues. My mother was so mad that we ate something wild like that, but I felt like a great explorer that day.

I remember my dad burning a black plastic bag that he wound into a tight rope-like thing with knots and hung from a clothes line. The plastic would drip into a kid swimming pool. Every drip made this "ZZZZSSSSEEEEEP" sound. "ZZZZSSSSEEEEEP!" "ZZZZSSSSEEEEEP!!" and ended with a fizz as it hit the water. I have told many people that there are more rednecks in Michigan than in Tennessee and my dad certainly was one of the reddest THAT day! I loved every molten drop.

I shared a bedroom with my older brother Jeff. The bedroom was small, and it was off of a short hallway, diagonal from our bathroom. Immediately to the left of our room was THE DOOR! This was the locked doorway to the garage. The garage was off limits to us as renters and I'm sure the padlock was just a reassurance to the homeowner that it would stay "off limits". The door was brown, a little meatier than all of the other doors in the house and had obviously been an aftermarket addition. I was scared to death of the door. I never told my family, but I would walk by it quickly and tried to never look at it. To my 5 year old mind, this door was the only thing that separated me from goblins, ghouls and monsters. And I had this belief that the door had some characteristics that made it side with those nasty beings instead of me.

The times I would get up the courage to look at the door, I made SURE it was still LOCKED. Thankfully we lived there for only about a year, but I remember that feeling of fear, and being short of breath some nights because of it.

"Yes Logan, you can sleep here until morning". I threw my arm around him and the next thing I knew, it was light outside.

Jason