When Fear Says We Can't

Photo by Sven Brandsma on Unsplash

We’ve always told our youngest son the story of the day he turned three. He woke up that birthday morning down in Texas (during language school) and told my husband, Peter, he had a dream he could ride a two-wheeler bike. He asked his dad to get it out of storage so he could ride it.

So, doing what all great dads do, my husband dragged out the bike and got ready to launch our little guy down the paved road on his fledgling flight. And, like all good moms, I scolded him. “Are you kidding me? You’re going to send him down the pavement? You’re not even going to start him in the grass? No helmet or training wheels? He’s three!”

“He said he can ride it.”

“He had a dream he could ride it!”

“Yeah,” my husband shrugged. “Let’s see what he can do.”

A three-year-old! Really? A two-year-old just the day before. Are you kidding me?

I’m not even going to tell you how the story ends because just the other day, I broke into our old computer and guess what I found? I had taped it. The whole thing. I didn’t remember that. But, here it is, my baby’s first try on a two-wheeler after a dream that said he could do it:

What happened? What made it possible for him in that moment to take a dream and make it real? How did he do it? 

The answer is in him: He believed with all his heart he could ride that bike. That he had everything he needed within him to make it happen. He didn’t stop to ask what if he failed. If he fell. If he got banged up along the way. He never allowed the fear of what “might” come to stop him in his tracks—to debilitate his dream.

Fear can do that. It can knock us out. And it’s usually not the expected punch—the jab or the right hook—the straight-in-the-face warnings to keep us safe; the reason we have fear in the first place (to avoid the cliff, to run from the snarling dog). But it’s the sucker punch, the one from behind. The one that didn’t feel like a punch until we’re down on the ground.

Fear speaks loudest through the voices in our heads. Voices from our past. From those around us. The ones that say we can’t do it. There’s too much at risk. We’ll fail. We’re not good enough. The ones that, by the time the list is complete, the dream is dead.

So, how do we conquer fear? How do we move forward?

Step One: Silence the Voices.

That sounds easy, but we all know it’s not. It takes work and effort to “take all thoughts captive in obedience to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). The voices and messages are embedded deep within us. And, even when we’re not aware, they can dictate our choices. Whose voice do you hear when you’re measuring your steps? When you’ve found form to a dream? Think about it. Listen quietly. The voices are talking whether you want them to or not. 

How often we allow people power over us; power in our heads, power in our lives. Often, it’s people closest to us, but sometimes, we even give this power to strangers. People we don’t even know. How do they gain a voice in our head, a place to determine our own value? Strangers? We give them an ear because somewhere, deep down, they confirm the lie. The lie that we don’t measure up.

Even good voices can hinder us. We all need cheerleaders, encouragers in our life, people to spur us on. But when we seek those out, when we allow the accolades to dictate our worth, we can end up as approval-seekers. We’ve listened to the wrong voice. 

But here’s the secret. There’s only one Voice that really matters. One that holds the truth of who you are and what you can do.

Step Two: Listen to the One.

Can you hear your Father’s voice? The One who calls you “dearly beloved child.” The One who formed you and knows you intimately. The only One with the power to give you worth, the One to place value on your life. His voice says you are held, forgiven, adopted, strong, whole, victorious, fearfully and wonderfully made, never alone, complete, dearly loved, and nothing can take you out of His hand. And His opinion of you does not falter because it doesn’t depend on you. It’s not a worth you need to prove. So, if that’s the case, how can another person, even a stranger, gain more access to your heart then Him? 

Step Three: Keep Pedaling.

When the disciple Peter saw Jesus on the water, he first asked, “Is it you, Lord.” When the answer was ‘yes,’ he got out of the boat. And because he got out—and he was the only one—he walked on water. He experienced the miracle. Do you hear Him? Is He saying, ‘I have placed this dream in you. You have everything you need, and I’m right here with you.’?

If that’s you, if you hear Him calling, step out. If He’s given you a dream, it won’t happen with training wheels or soft grass. Not even with an audience (even your own mother) yelling on the sidelines, “It’s not safe, don’t try it.”

I could watch this video over and over again. Not because it’s my little guy—and he’s pretty darn cute—but because it reminds me to carry my dreams with me, to pull them out of storage. To climb on. Pedal like the wind. And most of all, believe in my heart that, if God has given me a dream, I can do it.

A Stripping Away

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

I’ve been off for a while. The pandemic and all. I just didn’t know how to speak into it. So much pain and heartache and loss. Isolation. A re-routing on life, I guess. Maybe a stripping away.

I sat around the table last night with my kids. We talked and laughed, not about the things today, but stories of yesterday. My youngest son shared one of his earliest memories. He was two, and we were packing up for Mexico. Such a vivid memory for a little one. He remembers looking out the window at our garage sale one week before we left. All of our belongings scattered across the lawn. When he saw another kid pick up his race track to buy, he ran outside and tried to hand him something else—a different toy, so he wouldn’t have to part with his favorite track, his favorite matchbox cars. But I stopped my little guy because we just couldn’t take it along, and I let the sale go through. He had to let go. He was young for such a grand lesson.

Sometimes life doesn’t feel like “letting go” but “stripping away.” It sometimes feels as if we have no say in it. The decision doesn’t seem to be ours.

That day at the garage sale, we got rid of everything that wouldn’t fit in our van and travel trailer. With a family of seven, trust me, it didn’t feel like much came with us. And each of my children remembers something they lost that day. But we packed in everything we could—everything we thought we needed—waved to our best friends down the driveway, and drove 2000 miles to our language school in Texas.

I remember too the day we left Texas one year later with as much Spanish under our belts as we could grab hold of and the whole world open to what lay ahead for our family in Mexico. Our last stop before pulling out of the school was the bodega where our things had been in storage. For a good two hours, we worked in the sweltering heat to shove our belongings back in the places they should have fit. Believe me, my husband is the best packer around. If he can’t puzzle it in, it can’t be puzzled.

Yet, at the end, there were still six plastic bins on the sidewalk.

“We can’t take these,” he said.

“We have to.” There was no bending in my mind. No compromise. Not now. We had already given away so much. This was the bare minimum.  

“We can’t,” he said. Period.

I sat down on one of those bins and cried. It poured out from some untapped reservoir inside of me. The anger first. I already had nothing. Why more? God, will you take everything from me? I cried, not for the “things”—children’s clothing and pots and pans—but for the hope. The dreams. All that those bins somehow represented inside of me. My family’s chance to start again. To have a home. A new life together.

We took those bins to the school’s thrift shop. One by one the woman lifted the lid and explored the items inside. Oh, I had needed that … I had a place for those, I thought. Like my two-year-old trying to hold onto his race track that day, I had to let go. The woman smiled at all the items she could re-home, and we left.

I think I might have cried to the border.

And we entered a land so foreign to us. People we didn’t know. A language we could barely speak. Unspoken rules we kept breaking. When our first team came down from our home church—our friends, faces we knew and loved—I remember the sheer panic I felt as they boarded the plane to leave. Please, take me with you. Don’t leave me behind. When our friends left, I experienced a whole new level of stripping. Not things, but people I loved. And I felt very alone.

One day, a man came from the states. I don’t even remember his name or why he was there. But I remember him. I stood with him at the ranch while activity whirled around us. A team was digging a trench. They were laughing despite the dirt and grime and heat. The man told me about a ministry he was involved in back home. He said the old-timers would sit around the fire and talk about the good ole times. The inception. The beginning. The glory days. The days that were rough and hard and took everything from you. He said how he wished he could have been a part of the stories, of the life when it all began.

Then the man turned and looked at me and said, “Someday, you’ll be sitting around a fire talking about the ranch. Because, right now, right here … these are the glory days.”

You know what? He was right.

But sometimes we can’t see it in the moment. Sometimes, we just feel the loss. We feel like we don’t have a choice. That things are happening around us we have no control of. And every day something else is taken from us. But often we can’t see from where we’re standing. We don’t know what’s just around the corner.

And what we think is a stripping away … is actually a new beginning.

Photo by Danielle Macinne (Unsplash)