Fear Factor

Recently I've been really struggling with fear. I don't know if its the surge of postpartum hormones or what, but I hate being a fraidey cat. Every new mother does the checking to make sure the baby's breathing routine, but with this pregnancy it just seems to me its been a little more than normal fear. With all that we went through it was warranted, but I really had a lot of truly horrible bad dreams. Labor and delivery was nearly a panic attack and that coming from a seasoned veteran of the delivery room table. Yuck, I hate my human frailty. So I decided yesterday that enough was enough. Prayer is my only weapon at times like this and its more than enough believe me. The Lord started revealing to me some important scriptural truth on the subject of fear.

2 Timothy 1:7

For God did not give us a spirit of timidity (of cowardice, of craven and cringing and fawning fear), but [He has given us a spirit] of power and of love and of calm and well-balanced mind and discipline and self-control.

He gives us the spirit of power, which gives us authority over fear in our lives. Because of what Jesus did on the cross, we have power to overcome.

Love seems out of place in regards to fear but the Word says in 1 John 4:17 that, "There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love." When you're talking about relationships, fear and love make more sense. If you love someone you need to be able to trust him. That's where fear can come in and cripple the relationship. We must trust God that He loves us and also trust Him in order to love Him. If you're walking around in a partnership that you can't really feel comfortable that the other person is doing their part, you won't let your guard down.

The calm and well-balance mind is where our imaginations come into play. Fear can make your mind think some pretty crazy things. You have got to have control over your imagination. That includes not allowing influences like television, movies or even books or magazines to feed into your imagination.

These things don't make it easy to overcome my fear, but they do give me insight into how I can combat it and win.