Freedom from Fear

For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline. ~ 2 Timothy 1:7

So many thoughts have been going through my mind that I have yet to form an entry of it all, at least a coherent one anyway. I need time. Time to stand back and absorb it all. Time to delve into the Word. Time to figure out what kind of wife I need to be at this moment for my husband.

Driving home from fellowship on Saturday night, Lee began to explain what he was feeling to me. It was past midnight. It was cold. The roads were covered with snow. In the privacy and quietness of our car, I tried to understand what he was saying. And since Lee doesn’t very often pour out what is in his heart, I listened hard. In the end, I know I can’t empathize with what this means for him. When asked by people how he feels about what happened, he answers with the simple statement: “I feel like my best friend just turned his gun on me.”

He says this because ever since he took this new post as I.T. Manager, he’s been affirmed continually by his colleagues and boss. In fact, the affirmation came with a top notch performance review and a salary increase. This all took place two weeks before he got laid off. Of course, his being let go had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the recession we find ourselves in at the moment. Suddenly, the dismal headlines in the newspapers are hitting a little closer to home.

Now and then I ask Lee whether he’s okay. Quite often at first. To the point where I asked him, “Is my asking you whether you’re okay annoying you?” He answered, “Kinda.” “Do you want me to stop?” I then ask. He doesn’t answer. That in itself communicated a lot.

Repeatedly, he has said that it isn’t the financial aspect that vexes him as much as the psychological. If constant affirmation in the workplace isn’t a sign that you’re going to get to keep your job, what is?

This, of course, goes back to the age-old theme that nothing in this earthly life can be fully relied upon. We all know that. We live like we don’t, until one of us, inevitably, has the rug pulled from under us. We’re taught this time and time again in the Bible. Nothing is new under the sun.

While Lee is working on his résumé, talking on the phone with recruiters, networking with all his business contacts, I’m tending to Nathaniel or reading. I’ve picked up Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Spiritual Depression again—thinking that the book would speak to our current situation. Coincidentally, the chapter I left off at just a few months ago was entitled, “Fear of the Future.”

I noted the following passage in this chapter:

Our fears are due to our failure to stir up—failure to think, failure to take ourselves in hand. You find yourself looking to the future and then you begin to imagine things and you say: ‘I wonder what is going to happen?’ And then, your imagination runs away with you. You are gripped by the thing; you do not stop to remind yourself of who you are and what you are, this thing overwhelms you and down you go.

Now the first thing you have to do is to take a firm grip of yourself, to pull yourself up, to stir up yourself, to take yourself in hand and to speak to yourself. As the Apostle puts it, ‘we have to remind ourselves of certain things. And as I understand it, the big thing that Paul is saying in effect to Timothy is: “Timothy, you seem to be thinking about yourself and about life and all you have to do as if you were still an ordinary person. But, Timothy, you are not an ordinary person! You are a Christian, you are born again, the Spirit of God is in you. But you are facing all these things as if you are still what you once were, an ordinary person’.

And is not that the trouble with us all in this connection? Though we are truly Christian, though we believe the truth, though we have been born again, though we are certainly children of God, we lapse into this condition in which we again begin to think as if none of these things had happened to us at all. Like the man of the world, the man who has never been regenerated, we allow the future to come to us and to dominate us, and we compare our own weakness and lack of strength with the greatness of the falling and the tremendous task before us. And down we go as if we were but our natural selves. Now the thing to do, says Paul to Timothy, is to remind yourself that we have been given the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, and to realize that because of this our whole outlook upon life and the future must therefore be essentially different. We must think of suffering in a new way, we must face everything in a new way.

Jones continues in the chapter by making the next empowering statement:

Living the Christian life means we have the “power to endure, power to go on whatever the conditions, whatever the circumstances, power to hold on and to hold out. Let me go further, it means that the most timorous person can be given power in all things, even to die.”

But how are we to free ourselves from running away with our imagination, one replete with human worry? Jones says it is necessary to get rid of ourselves—that is, our persistent need to be engrossed in self-love, self-concern, and self-protection. We do this by becoming “absorbed in someone or something else that [we] have no time to think about [ourselves]. Thank God, the Spirit of God makes that possible.” We are to think of “the love of the Son in its breadth, its length, its depth, its height… Think of His love, and as you come to know something about it, you will forget yourself.”

My calmness right now, I must confess, is because this is the first day that Lee is out of work. God truly showed his grace to us during this time, for Lee, having only worked for this company for seven months, nonetheless received a two-month severance package, in addition—vacation pay and bonus.

We are praying. We are actively searching for job prospects. We are taking it one day at a time and trusting Him who is the provider. We are looking ahead. We are hoping. But I must say—eight weeks is not a long time, and as the days or weeks go by, and should we not hear anything, I pray hard that our faith does not grow any less weak because we have more reason to be fearful. I pray hard that, as Jones has described, we do not respond to our situation like ordinary persons—but as children of God, with the Spirit in us. Not only that, I pray hard that, whatever might come our way in this time of uncertainty, that we turn it all into glory to the One who graciously gave us life.