4 The Fear Trap

I lay in my hospital bed not only shocked that I was there and facing what I was facing, but with a new hyperawareness of my body. Every little twinge of pain got my attention, anything out of the ordinary caused me concern, and everything the doctor examined or asked caused me to wonder why. My attention was captured by my physical state more than ever before. I couldn’t help but wonder what would go wrong next. I became an expert in things that I had never thought about before. This new focus, this new awareness, wasn’t a blessing; it was a burden. Suffering opens your eyes, focuses your mind, and produces awareness like you never had before.

After his heart attack, Brad seemed aware of every heartbeat and worried every time he felt a twinge of pain in his chest.

After her husband had confessed to being unfaithful, Sheila unpacked every word he said, examined him every time he left the house, and traced his steps whenever she could.

After Julie discovered drugs in her son’s car, she became hyperaware of his responses to her, the people he hung out with, and the places he went.

Sally had lost all she’d worked for. A victim of fraud, she now had her eyes open and found it very hard to trust anyone with her money.

After Jim’s death, Linda couldn’t stop thinking about all her loved ones. She called too often and asked too many questions. She just couldn’t deal with the loss of another.

After being betrayed by his closest friend and colleague, Thompson watched others and listened intently. He told himself that it would never happen to him again.

After the accident that took his wife, Bill was afraid to marry again and was so hypervigilant on the road that driving became a major source of stress.

After losing his job, Frank became so focused on his failures and weaknesses that it seemed impossible to jump back into the job market.

Rather than joyful expectation, Mindy experienced her pregnancy with fear and dread. Her previous miscarriage had created a new awareness of the dangers of pregnancy and had robbed her of joy.

The death of his first church plant made Tom aware of things he had never been aware of before and wondering if a life of pastoral ministry was for him after all.

After being mugged, Sarah was so aware of everything and everyone around her in the city that she couldn’t deal with the stress and moved to a distant suburb and a new job.

Sam wandered around his house, now more aware of Judy’s absence than he had ever been of her presence. He was paralyzed, unable to move on.

Shuttled from foster home to foster home, Peter was all too aware that people often fail to do what they promise and do what they said they would never do. He watched every new family like a hawk and was unwilling to really open his heart.

Suffering of whatever kind, with whatever it may bring your way, creates a focused awareness that is part of the burden that every sufferer bears. It causes you to notice what once would not have gotten your attention and to carry concerns that you’d never carried before. This new awareness becomes fertile soil for a new set of fears that have the power to shape the way you interpret and live your life. Let me detail the awareness and fear struggle for you.

1. Your New Awareness Begins to Control Your Meditation

The level of wisdom of your interpretation of what is going on in your world and the sanity of your responses to it are shaped, controlled, and directed by the focus of your meditation. Since you and I never stop thinking, it’s important to examine what is so powerful in our lives that it has the power to capture our thoughts over and over again. You know what it’s like when something very bad or very good happens: our minds tend to return to it again and again in those moments when nothing else is commanding our attention. So our thoughts are always under the control of something.

Suffering tends to kidnap our thoughts and in so doing has a powerful effect on our emotions and responses. The dynamic is clear—the more you meditate on a problem, the bigger, scarier, and more unsolvable it appears. This is also why fighting for control of your meditation is so important in the life of every sufferer.

After waiting several decades for the promised son, the one on whom Abraham had invested all his hopes and on whom all the covenant promises rested, God asked the unthinkable. Had the long wait not been enough of a test? Was God really asking Abraham to sacrifice this long-promised son? (see Gen. 22:1–19; Heb. 11:17–20). Put yourself in Abraham’s place. What would you have been thinking? What would you have felt? If all you focused on was the situation itself, it would seem like a cruel trick, and you would be filled with rage. And the more you tried to make sense of it, the more questions you would come up with.

But Abraham came into this moment having been fully persuaded of the goodness and faithfulness of God and God’s willingness and ability to do whatever he had promised (see Rom. 4:18–21). He was able to calmly do the unthinkable, because for years his daily thoughts had been focused on the goodness, faithfulness, and power of his Lord. He wasn’t paralyzed by the circumstances, confusing and distressing as they were, because he looked at those circumstances through the lens of the beautiful faithfulness and awesome power of God.

Contrast Abraham’s response with the Israelite soldiers who for forty days huddled in their tents in fear of the Philistine warrior Goliath. Rather than reminding themselves that they were the children of the Lord Almighty, who had promised to defeat their enemies, and, in so doing, taking control of their meditation, they let themselves think about the impossibility of defeating such a warrior (see 1 Samuel 17). No wonder no one in the regular army volunteered to go into that valley and face Goliath. For those forty days the Israelite soldiers went undefeated by Goliath. Sadly, they were defeated by their own meditation.

The power of what you are suffering to control your meditation is a huge spiritual issue for every sufferer. What controls your meditation will control your thoughts about God, yourself, others, your situation, and even the nature of life itself. And as you meditate on what you are suffering, your joy wanes, your hope fades, and God seems increasingly distant. In the meantime, God hasn’t changed, his truth is still true, and what you’re facing hasn’t grown bigger, but it all seems bigger, darker, and more impossible. Your suffering has replaced God and his truth as the lens through which you look at and understand life. You are not dealing just with what you are suffering but with the pain of how your meditation causes you to understand it, feel about it, and respond to it. When was the last time you prayed, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” (Ps. 19:14)? What has control of your meditation today?

2. Your Meditation Stimulates Fear

What you fear will be directly influenced by where you focus the thoughts of your heart. There is a direct connection between what you meditate on and what you fear. This is one of the reasons for the warning in Proverbs 4:23, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” As with the other aspects of suffering already noted, the level of fear you experience when you are suffering is not just the result of the magnitude of the thing you are suffering, but, maybe even more significantly, the result of what has captured and focused the thoughts of your heart while you are living through it. The more you focus on the thing you’re suffering, the bigger, more complicated, and more impossible it becomes. But something else even more significant and life-shaping is happening at the same time.

As your difficulty looms larger and larger, dominating the vision of the eyes of your heart and controlling the thoughts of your mind, your Lord seems to shrink in size and power. Few people suffer from the fact that their God is too large! Because your field of vision and the center of your thoughts are now dominated by your difficulty, God’s awesome glory, the hugeness of his power, and the comfort of his presence don’t. Fear then has room to settle in. Your suffering has already taught you that you’re not in control, that you are fairly weak and definitely not independent. This means that in your heart of hearts, you know you can’t handle your difficulty on your own. So it’s spiritually devastating and emotionally paralyzing to fall into thinking that God is small, distant, or lacking in the power that you know you desperately need. I’ve often heard sufferers describe how God has shrunk in their view, and I’ve thought, “If that’s who I thought God was, I wouldn’t trust him either.” Because their formal theology hasn’t changed, they are unaware of how much their functional view of God has, and because of this, they are chased and haunted by fear.

Because their meditation has robbed them of enjoying God’s presence and glory, they are left weak, confused, and alone in their universe of difficulty. No wonder they are afraid! Remember, God will never ask you to deny reality, but if you allow your difficulty to control your meditation, you will end up hopeless and afraid. What has your trouble done to your meditation?

3. Fear Is Spiritual War

On this side of our final home, life is constant spiritual warfare. I am always a bit distressed when I hear someone talking of spiritual warfare as if it’s the unusual, exotic, and weirdly dark fringe of the Christian life. The reality is that spiritual warfare is mundane, normal Christianity because our hearts are always a battleground between fear and faith, between doubt and hope, and between what is true and what is false.

So how do we become controlled by fear and how do we defend ourselves against it? If your meditation has begun to make you believe that God is small, distant, uncaring, or lacking in power, then you’re left in the universe all by yourself. And if you’re being victimized by cancer, racism, adultery, financial loss, death of a loved one, betrayal, etc., you know that you’ve no power to defeat it. No wonder you’re assaulted by fear, if you’ve somehow come to believe that it’s you against the world.

I’ve listened again and again to people of faith tell their stories as if God didn’t exist. As I listened for even the slightest recognition of God’s presence, promises, or power, I would think to myself, “No wonder this person is in such a panic.” Problems have loomed so large that they’ve blinded them from the One who is their only hope.

It’s important to remember that we were never created for independence. Even before the entrance of sin into the world and all the suffering it brought with it, Adam and Eve were designed to be dependent on God. Successful independent living is a delusion. If I think it’s all on my shoulders, and I know that what I’m facing is beyond my wisdom and ability, I will be afraid. This is why the warning of Psalm 37:8 is so helpful: “Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.” Or, in my own words, “Stop allowing your heart to be controlled by fear because fear only leads to evil.” The decisions we make out of fear tend to be the decisions we regret. You and I have to fight for the faith of our hearts. The next point will explain how to do that. How many of your responses and decisions in suffering are made out of fear and no faith?

4. Fear Is Forgetful

Perhaps there is no greater weakness in the heart and life of a sufferer than forgetfulness. Because suffering assaults your mind with so many new things to consider, to face, to decide, to wonder about, or to fear, it’s so easy to lose sight of and to practically forget the things that have been your motivation, your comfort, your security, and your rock of hope. This is such a problem that the psalms, which portray for us the battle for a heart of faith in the midst of the trials of life, talk repeatedly about the need to remember. In fact, two psalms (118 and 136) are entirely dedicated to the importance of fighting forgetfulness. Hear the instructive words of Psalm 136, which I have copied for you below. If you’re going to fight forgetfulness and the fear it produces, you’re going to have to get into the habit of sitting down and recounting all the ways that God in love has guided you, provided for you, protected you, and met you with his grace and mercy. If you are going to fight forgetfulness, you’re going to have to do this again and again. Doing so is not a denial of present difficulty; rather, it forces you to look at it through the lens of the presence, power, and love of your Savior. And you need to burn this refrain into your mind in those moments when aloneness, forgetfulness, and fear are about to set in: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, / for his steadfast love endures forever” (Ps. 136:1). Stop now and read Psalm 136.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

Give thanks to the God of gods,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

Give thanks to the Lord of lords,