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Faith Over Fear

November 22, 2021


Giving Thanks. This Thanksgiving will be different. To accommodate our son who will be working, we moved our celebration to Sunday. For the first time in a long time, we will gather around a restaurant table instead of our dining room table. We will focus special attention on our blessings – those we take for granted, and those that are granted by surprise.


It’s been five months since Ed was diagnosed with colon cancer and our emotional rollercoaster ride began. In the midst of this personal journey, friends and family members have succumbed to Covid, and I underwent surgery to find that I also had the beginning stages of colon cancer. While the surgeon was able to remove mine, Ed continues with a treatment plan that has not always gone smoothly.


At the end of the day, our faith has strengthened.  Friends and family have rallied around with support through prayer and encouragement. Our children and grandchildren are drawn closer as they provide emotional and practical support, despite some of their own challenges as adults.


Some would say it is easier to give up and surrender to your trials; easier to live in a place of self-pity and defeatism. But, once you establish residence in that place, it’s not so easy to pick up and move,  to see the blessings, to embrace happiness and inner peace. But, Ed and I have chosen another path; the path paved by faith and the promises of God.


I recently heard that are not born to fear, but it is a product of doubt, placed in us by the Master of Fear himself.  When I let fear enter my soul, I am overcome with dread and worry of what I am experiencing on a personal level and what I anticipate for my future. Will Ed’s health crisis be resolved?  Will my children find true happiness and fulfillment as they face hard choices?  Will I live out my life knowing I have fulfilled a purpose pleasing to God?  Churchill said it best, “All we have to fear is fear itself.”  Of all the prayers I could recite, all of the requests I could make to God, the one that would cover it all would be that He grant me freedom from fear.


What I have come to realize (again) is that a child raised in the belief of Christ’s teachings, or the person who comes to find God along the way, does not have to fear in times of confusion or personal loss, but only lean on faith.  When life throws curve balls and we would crumble, it is that childhood faith, the salvation we proclaim that comes to rescue us from despair and hopelessness. This is why it is critical that we teach our children to love God, to rely on a higher power, that nothing is hopeless and that they need not fear, but trust in God.


Of all we could pray for, our prayer for a life free from fear could lay waste to much of the world's woes. Replacing fear with faith would give God a much easier path into our hearts, easing our own pain and suffering.

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