The evil force pursued me. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, but I knew it was malevolent and wanted to ensure my demise. I tried to run, but the trail ahead thickened with mud. Even when I aimed for solid ground, each step sucked my feet into the mire in as my pursuer neared. When I could feel its shadow…

I jolted awake.

My heart raced as I tried process the transition between dream reality and waking up in bed. It took about an hour before I calmed down enough to go back to sleep.

In some ways, this echoes the post from two weeks ago. Not sure what’s making it an anxious season.

It is quite human to suffer from fear. In fact, that was our first reaction to sin. Adam said, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.”

My concordance has over four hundred references for fear and over two hundred for afraid. Most of the afraid ones are in the phrase “do not be afraid” which kind of explains our natural state.

Sometimes, it seems, I tend to that more than most. When something is unknown, my brain defaults to worst case scenario. Why does this person want to see me? I must have done something wrong. Why am I having this strange symptom? I must be on death’s door.

Few, except for my immediate family, believe my internal reactions because I have an amazingly stoic Swedish poker face. But my racing heart and aching lungs (I hold my breath whenever fearful or anxious) know it all too well.

Writing this, writing anything, involves a fair amount of fear. I started writing this a while ago. I’d type a few words, then I hem and haw, “is that right?” “Should I say that?” “Will people scold me for all these double quotation marks touching each other which is so against the Oxford English rules?”

As a person who regularly has nightmares, fearing colors my nights. I spend a good portion of my sleeping hours running from demons, fighting for a lost cause, shouting for help where no one hears, rescuing someone from imminent demise over and over, etc. The blessing about these nightmares is that they have provided a fair number of plot lines for my stories. The flip side to them is that I will often wake up on high alert (aka last night) and have to read, pace, recite songs and Bible verses, pray or whatever else to distract myself until I can fall back asleep.

Most dreams are totally unrealistic. I know that. But the darkness of night makes all fears more real, more possible. It’s like the darkness of our soul is amplified. We can see in the wee hours a glimpse of who we could have been before the fall and who we might be someday on the other end of eternity. I think it’s that disconnect from who we were originally created to be that generates the condition of fear. After all, like Adam showed us at the foundation of the world, it was an immediate reaction to falling from grace.

Therefore, the human condition, as God well knows, is wrapped up in fear. According to my web search, there are over four hundred officially recognized phobias. People live with fear of one kind or another all the time. And, fears have been with us since the beginning.

But the Bible indicates that the only good fear is the fear of God. For instance, the heroes of old, like Noah, lived righteously because they feared God. And in Proverbs, it tells us “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge…” and “Then you will understand the fear of the Lord, And find the knowledge of God.”

When we fear and reverence God and realize that he controls all and knows all, when we truly bow in awe of him, the earth-bound fears lose their intensity.

That’s the key to getting past fear. That’s why God repeatedly says in Scripture, “do not be afraid, nor dismayed for I am with you.” If we trust in the way he is working and in the purposes for the kingdom and rejoice in the provision of eternal life granted by the cross, we don’t need to fear.

We still will. Especially in the long dark nights of the soul, we still will suffer fear. It’s just helpful to realize when the sun comes up again, that we didn’t need to.

Because we serve an all-powerful, awesome God who is both worthy of our holy fear and who has eternity in his hands.