The Confident Woman: Start Today Living Boldly and Without Fear (22 page)

Our little dog has no responsibilities. She lies around or sleeps, plays, eats, drinks and goes to the bathroom. When anything unusual happens, it frightens her and she begins to get nervous and shake. Once she understands what is going on she begins to calm down.

One night I was lying in bed and heard a noise upstairs. The longer I listened to it the more frightened I became. Finally, shaking from fear, I went upstairs to see what it was. I had to laugh when I discovered it was ice cubes falling in the ice tray from the ice maker. It just happened that the way they were falling was making a noise they did not normally make.

Lack of knowledge causes fear and knowledge removes it.

Let me tell you a true but tragic story: A woman was once walking along a riverbank with her child. Suddenly the child slipped into the river. The mother screamed in terror! She couldn’t swim and besides, she was in the latter stages of pregnancy. Finally, somebody heard her screaming and rushed down to the riverbank. The utter tragedy was, when they stepped into those murky waters to retrieve the child, now dead, they found that the water was only waist deep! That mother could have easily saved her child but didn’t because of a lack of knowledge.
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The mother must have felt terrible because she didn’t check to see how deep the water was. But, fear makes us behave irrationally. Between fear of the child drowning and fear of the water she was paralyzed and did nothing. Knowledge could have changed this entire tragic story.

Knowledge will help you have confidence. If you are going for a job interview, make sure you are prepared and have all the knowledge you will need with you to answer questions they may ask you. We live in a world today where knowledge is as close as your computer. Not only can you do online research about the company you’re applying with but you can find tips on how to have a successful interview.

Instead of being afraid of something you are not familiar with, familiarize yourself with it. Do some research or ask some questions. It might take a little effort to do so, but it is better than being tormented by fear.

You can move from pain to power simply by reeducating your mind. The Bible refers to this process as renewing the mind. Simply put, we must learn how to think differently. If you have been taught to fear you can be taught to be bold, courageous and confident. Rather than allowing fear to prevent your success and joy in life, you can accept that it is a fact of life. Throughout life you will have to either run away from things in fear or face them confidently. Fear has a large shadow, but it is actually very small. When we fear we will suffer, we already suffer the things we fear. Fear brings torment!

Instead of thinking that you cannot do things if you are afraid, make up your mind that you will do whatever you need to do even if you have to do it afraid. Change your thinking about fear. We allow fear to become a monster in our thinking, but it is one that will back down quickly when confronted. Fear is like the school bully. It pushes everyone around until someone finally challenges it.

The renewing of the mind is the most important thing a person needs to do after receiving Jesus Christ as their Savior. Jesus died for our sins and He wants us to enjoy the life He has provided. God’s Word teaches us that He has provided a good plan for each person, yet they will never experience it unless they know about it and also know how to access it (Romans 12:2). People perish and their lives are destroyed for a lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6). Knowledge and understanding is power when applied properly.

Trisha was haunted by an unreasonable fear that her husband Bob would get involved with another woman and leave her. Her fear made her suspicious and she frequently accused her husband of things that made no sense to him at all. For example, if he needed to work overtime she would call his office to check and make sure he was there because she suspected he was seeing another woman. If for some reason he did not answer the phone she panicked. She would even get into her car and drive past his place of work just to make sure he was there.

One night she called to check on him and when he did not answer she drove to his office. He was in the bathroom when she called and he immediately left to go home after that. By the time she arrived at his office his car was gone and the little voice inside her head began tormenting her with accusations against Bob. She was surprised to find his car in the garage, but it was too late to gain control of her emotions, she was already enraged with anger and suspicion. When she approached Bob, she was saying so many things that made no sense at all to him that he began to wonder about her sanity. This scene and others like it were slowly but surely eroding Bob’s respect for Trisha.

Once he bought her a special bracelet to surprise her. They were planning to go to dinner that weekend and he had hidden the bracelet. In the middle of the week while cleaning out a drawer she normally would not get into, she found the bracelet and once again, because of her fear, she immediately thought that it was a gift he had purchased for another woman. It never entered her mind that it might be a gift for her. It is not the nature of fear to look at the positive possibilities, but instead it always assumes the worst.

Even when Bob told her that he had purchased it for her, she didn’t believe him at first. Trisha’s behavior began to seriously affect their relationship and he told her that she had to get to the bottom of these ridiculous fears. He never gave her one reason to distrust him and could not understand what her problem was. To be honest, she didn’t understand it either until she began to pray about it. God revealed to her that her fear was the fruit of a sudden and tragic change in her own life when as a child her father left her mother for another woman who he worked with.

Having understanding about where the fear came from really helped Trisha to resist it. She began reading and educating herself about the nature of fear. For quite some time she still had some of the same thoughts and feelings but she was now able to reason with herself because she had knowledge. As time went by the fear went with it and Bob and Trisha’s relationship healed.

Many fears are the result of something that happened in the past and that we fear will happen again. If a person’s mother died of cancer they might fall prey to a fear that they will die the same way. They could become paranoid and fear that every little ache, pain or strange feeling in their body is cancer. Fear that you will suffer, causes suffering already while you are in fear. The fear we have about an event that may happen is usually worse than the thing would be even if it did happen. Don’t be afraid that your life will end; instead, believe that it’s just beginning.

When we lean into the dilemma and trust the hand of God—we gain control.

Instead of fighting a fear or merely putting up with it, start praying about how it gained entrance into your life, especially if the fear is a repetitive one. I always became fearful when Dave tried to correct our children and it was because I was corrected in an abusive way when I was growing up at home. I didn’t understand the reason for my fear until God revealed it to me through prayer. You might even need to get some counseling to get to the root of your fears, but whatever you do, don’t just put up with them. God has a great life waiting for you and you must reach for it confidently.

John Ortberg tells the story of a snow skier who after pointing his ski tips down the barrel of a black-rated slope, quickly entered the land of no control and instinctively leaned backward in hope of reversing sure disaster. “We all do that,” says Ortberg. “But in life, as in snow-skiing, the answer is not to react in fear and lean back and away from the experience, but rather lean into it. When we lean into the dilemma and trust the hand of God—we gain control. Fear is a snare!”
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Remember not to run from your fears, lean into them and you will conquer them.

Parents, teachers and other role models can teach children how to fear or they can teach them to be bold. A mother who is fearful herself will transmit that fear to her children. She will be overly cautious about many things and a silent fear sinks into the heart of her children. We should not teach our children to live recklessly, but we should teach them to be bold, take action, and to never be so afraid of making mistakes that they won’t try things. I believe we should teach our children and those under our authority to take chances in life. If we never take a chance we will never make progress. Progress always requires stepping into the unknown. Experience gives us confidence but we never get experience unless we step out and try things we have not tried before.

A child who is told over and over, “you better not try that, you might get hurt,” will more than likely develop a deep rooted fear of trying new things. If a child hears “be careful” too frequently they may learn to be so careful that they end up living a narrow life that has no room for adventure. I encourage you to teach others by word and example how to be bold and courageous. Tell people to try things, reminding them that making a mistake is not the worst thing that can happen.

None of us knows for sure what the future holds. This lack of knowledge often opens the door for fear. What if I become disabled? What if my spouse dies? What if my child dies? What if we have another world war? What about terrorism? What kind of world will I be living in twenty-five years from now? Wondering about things we don’t have answers to opens the door to fear. Instead of wondering, trust God that whatever your future holds He will enable you to handle it when the time comes. Wherever you are going, God has already been there and paved the way for you.

I look at some of the things people go through and I think to myself, “I am afraid I could never go through that with the graciousness and courage I have seen them display.” Then I remind myself that when we must go through something, God gives us the strength to do so. When we merely fear going through something, we do it without any help from God at all. When I look back over my life and remember some of the things God has brought me through I think, “how did I do that?” It was because of God’s grace and power. He enabled me to do what I needed to do at the time and He will always do the same thing for you if you ask Him to. We may not know the future, but if we know the One who holds the future in His hands, we can look forward to it expectantly and without fear. If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it.

Chapter Thirteen

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STRESS AND FEAR

S
tress is one of the biggest problems we face in our society today. Everything is so fast-paced, loud and excessive that our mental, emotional and physical systems stay on overload. We are inundated with information. We have newspapers, magazines and 24-hour news networks that don’t just reach us through our television but through our cell phones and other mobile devices. At one time, a popular Web search engine indexed more than 3,307,998,701 Web pages!
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It’s hard enough to think about that number, let alone the content that goes with it. We have information overload and it is no wonder we have trouble calming our minds down so we can rest. In addition to what the world throws at us, we have schedules that are insane. There are never enough hours in any day to get everything done we are trying to do. We hurry and we rush, we feel frustrated and tired and we’re the first to say, “I’m under so much stress that I feel I am going to explode.”

Could fear be the root of many of our stresses? I believe it is. I believe we often get involved in things just because we are afraid of being left out. We are afraid we won’t know what is going on or that someone else will gain control of a situation if we are not there to speak for ourselves. We are afraid they might criticize us or think poorly of us if we say we don’t want to be involved.

We want our children to be like all the other children, so we let them get involved in far too many things and most of them require some involvement from us also. We are afraid they will get rejected, especially if we experienced a lot of rejection when we were children.

I never felt that I fit in as a child or teenager. Because of the abuse in my home and all the secrets I had to keep I could not develop proper relationships. I had to say no to a lot of invitations just because my father was so terribly strict and the result was that people stopped asking. I always felt left out and a bit odd.

I was afraid my children would go through the same pain I did so anything they wanted to do I thought we should find a way to do it, lest they feel left out as I did. People get under financial stress trying to have what everyone else has. Have you been one of the moms who bought a $150.00 pair of tennis shoes that you could not afford for your child just because “everyone has them?”

Are you so afraid of displeasing people that you say “yes” to a lot of things you know you should be saying “no,” to? If so, your stress is not caused by all the things you have to do, it is because you are afraid of disapproval.

We are afraid to be different so we desperately try to keep up with all the other people in our lives and it wears us out. The truth is we just want to go home and sit in a chair but we don’t want people to think we are a dud so we keep pushing ourselves to do things we don’t want to do.

Take a minute to stop and look closely at the reasons you are doing the things you currently do. If any of them are being done out of fear, then eliminate them. You will be amazed at how much time you may have if you have a spirit-led schedule rather than a people-driven one.