In Exchange For Fear
Personally, this past year has been exhilarating and scary – God has given me the blessing of starting a new job as a mental health therapist and because of this, I’ve become much more familiar with a clinical perspective of emotions. In my very limited experience within that lens, I’ve found that fear is an emotion that easily becomes a clinical concern and can fuel many other areas of emotional turmoil, no matter the validity of the fear itself.
I worked with one patient who experienced significant fear about his upstairs toilet overflowing. It had overflowed before, so every night, he would struggle to fall asleep, struggle to put his mind at ease, struggle to rest, because what if it happened again? To quell this unease, he would get out of bed, go upstairs, and check to ensure that the toilet was not, in fact, overflowing or running at all. But what if he had seen it wrong? What if he hadn’t been diligent enough in his inspection? So to make sure, he would check again, and after that, he would check another time. The idea of having water damage twice was so unacceptable that he couldn’t let it happen, even if it came at the cost of a full night’s rest.
The treatment for this scenario was not to problem-solve a more efficient method of checking the bathroom, or asking family members to help in shifts in his nightly role of vigilance. The treatment was that he was no longer allowed to check the flowing status of the upstairs toilet. He had to lay in bed at night and sit with the uncertainty that yes, it might overflow again. The purpose of this was to show him that an overflown toilet can be handled. It can be cleaned; it can be replaced. The possibility, the fear, is not in fact worth sacrificing your rest for.
Distinctly different than physical rest for the body is a singular and significant rest that God offers. It’s not just a peace of mind when trying to sleep at night, but an undercurrent of calm waters in the soul, “springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14). This rest is never worth sacrificing, no matter the fear or the feeling.
When it says that God made man “in his own image,” I believe that this is referring, at least in great part, to our emotional experience of life (Genesis 1:27).
We have an extensive record of God’s anger, Exodus says that God’s “name is Jealous,” specifying that He is “a jealous God,” and Ephesians instructs us to “grieve not the holy Spirit of God,” implying that God can be grieved by our choices (Exodus 34:14; Ephesians 4:30). I think this means sorrow, hurt, pain, and a deep understanding of loss. The scriptures also say that “God is love,” and from this verse and my own relationship with Him, I can confidently say that joy, compassion, empathy (Psalms tells us “his understanding is infinite”), and a tender kindness are things that only flow as part of Him (1 John 4:8; Psalms 147:5). I believe that we experience the magnitude of the emotional spectrum to allow us to understand something of God’s great heart.
Interestingly, I don’t see any record in the scriptures of God experiencing fear until we have record of Jesus, when the “Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). From this, I understand that fear is uniquely human, while rest is uniquely divine. “There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked” (Isaiah 57:21), but “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (Isaiah 57:21; Hebrews 4:9). These two exist at odds with one another. Juxtaposed in the Garden of Gethsemane was Jesus, sweating “as it were great drops of blood,” and the disciples, not able to watch with him an hour, sleeping just a stone’s cast away (Luke 22:44). Jesus knew what was to come, and I believe he felt afraid. The disciples didn’t, and clearly not panicked or anxious or fearful, they fell asleep in the presence of Jesus. I can’t entirely blame them; what a striking sense of safety they must’ve felt, even if they were entirely ignorant of what the next hour would bring. I know that the disciples were instructed to watch and pray that night because of what was to come, but that scene in the garden acts as a beautiful foreshadowing of a spiritual truth we have today, Jesus now having fully finished His work. I don’t know about tomorrow, and if there is a worry, if there is a concern, if there is any fear, I want to sleep in the garden while Jesus intercedes. “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). So He’ll bear your burdens, He’ll help you carry your cross, He’ll certainly hold your hand. He offers “beauty for ashes,” life “more abundantly,” and something I’ve been especially thankful for this year – rest, in exchange for all my fears. (Isaiah 61:3; John 10:10).
“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7)
Ryan Collier