You don’t have to fear fear
By
Ginny Luedeman
Some friends and I watched a television comedy about a
family that was afraid of everything unfamiliar to them. The title of
the skit was “the Fearful Family.: When the doorbell rang or a
newscast announced an unusual happening, the entire family would
yell, hang on to each other, and their hair would stand on end. It
made fear seem ridiculous and it was very funny.
To many people
fear isn’t a laughing matter, however. It’s a solid presence that
can freeze the natural abilities to be productive and enjoy
life.
Some years ago, I began to experience intense and sudden
fear for no apparent reason. The fear often came with out warning.
Sometimes I had to fight even to stay conscious. Usually the people
around me were unaware of what I was going through. I felt so
embarrassed by this unexplainable fear that I would often avoid
situations involving other people. It seemed impossible to tell
someone-in the middle of a normal encounter-that I needed to leave
and pray. Many mornings I would rather have stayed in bed than get up
and face the day. But I didn’t give in to this feeling. Each
morning I immediately made the bed, so I wouldn’t be tempted to get
back into it.
This challenging fear continued for a number of
years. With each new battle, the thoughts I needed in order to get
through the experience always rescued me. I studied passages about
fear, love, mind, and so on in the Bible and in Mary Baker Eddy’s
writings.
This passage in the Bible was really helpful: “There
is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.”(1) I
reasoned that the “perfect Love” that would cast out fear was
God. Because infinite, spiritual Love is perfect, its very nature and
presence destroy evil. There’s nothing perfect about evil-and so
the perfect love of Spirit casts it out. I prayed earnestly to
recognize and give up anything that would prevent me form
understanding and knowing this perfect love.
Though the fear
persisted and came quite often, life didn’t sit still and allow me
to run away and pray on some mountaintop. My husband, for instance,
served as an Army chaplain, and I was involved with him in this work.
At the same time, I began to work as a spiritual healer, and my
practice was beginning to grow. We adopted and fostered children. I
sang publicly.
Step by step I realized that I could continue
living, in spite of the fear. I knew God, or Spirit, would show me
that the fear was powerless. Whenever I thought I couldn’t go on,
this statement in Science and Health gave me needed courage: “Fear
never stopped being and its action.”(2) I was learning that I was
the expression of Spirit’s being, so I couldn’t be stopped from
any kind of normal action.
A turning point came. Once, in the
middle of the night, I woke up just filled with fear. I didn’t want
to disturb the family, so I stood in the middle of the dark bedroom
praying with all of my heart to be lifted above this awful feeling of
fear. We were living in Texas at the time, and the night skies were
particularly beautiful. As I prayed, the thought came to me to go to
the window, open the shade, and look up at the stars. As I did so, I
was dismayed to see that there wasn’t a single star in sight. The
sky was completely overcast.
At first, I felt that God had
forsaken me. But I continued to listen for His guidance, in spite of
the panic I was feeling. At last this gentle question came to me:
“Are the stars there?” I answered, “Yes.” Then I heard a
tender but firm explanation: “The stars are in perfect order, just
like your thoughts. All of the clouds on earth can’t touch the
order of the stars, any more than all your fears and anxieties can
touch the thoughts that I have given you. They are in perfect order
now.” A great peace flowed into my consciousness. All of the fear
vanished. I went back to sleep, enveloped in the arms of Love.
I
had mistakenly believed that I could choose to have good or evil
thoughts. I hadn’t understood that as the child of God’s
creating, my thoughts are as much created by the one Creator as is
the rest of my being. Because the thoughts God imparts to His
creation are wholly good and spiritual, pure and unchangeable, these
thoughts can never become less than Godlike, less than their divine
source.
As my new understanding grew, I realized that while we may
perceive past thoughts and anticipate future ones, God and His
creation live forever in the now. This is where you and I truly
exist, because we are spiritual beings who live in eternity, not in
time. This fact frees us from feeling that we began with a material
process, rather than with God. Such processes may include DNA
inherited at conception or any kind of negative family history.
Suffering caused by environmental damage, drugs, accidents, unnatural
tendencies, and so on, can be wiped out with the pure understanding
that all real thought is a natural impartation from the universal
Father-Mother we call God. Then we begin to see life as it really is,
as God has created it.
Mary Baker Eddy knew what it was to have a
life made new, and in her autobiography, Retrospection and
Introspection, she wrote, “The human history needs to be revised,
and the material record expunged.”(3) This is only possible because
material history is not a history of reality but of our beliefs about
reality. In this reality, good and evil are both possible; but what
God knows is the only reality, and God is only good. Even a little
understanding of this fact begins to free us from the burdens and
fears associated with the past, the present, and the future. The
thoughts that God has given us are ours now, always have been ours,
and always will be ours.
We don’t have to wait until all of our
fears are conquered before we claim our freedom. The Bible says that
God prepares a table for us “in the presence of (our) enemies.”(4)
We are safe in our discovery of God as our fearless Mind. We are in
the care of God. We are coming home to His love.
After that night
in Texas, I still had some moments of fear but the intensity lessened
and eventually the sudden fear disappeared entirely. Now I love a
starlit night even when there are clouds, because I know that the
stars are still there and in perfect order-just like the thoughts I
get from God.
1 l John 4:18.
2 Science and Health,
p.151.
3
Ret., p. 22.
4 PS. 23:5.
“Copyright©2004 The Christian Science
Publishing Society, All rights reserved, reproduced with permission”.
Ginny Luedeman
Copyright � 2004 ginnyl.com. All rights reserved.