When Fear Gathers
My worries compound to gathering waves of fear. The world feels unkind. The world feels unstable. Bad happens. Sad happens. Things happen that we do not understand. Here we struggle… to pay bills, to...
View ArticleWhat I Fear Most
What I fear most is despair for the world and us: forever less of beauty, silence, open air, gratitude, unbidden happiness, affection, unegotistical desire.-Wendell Berry, from Given Like Berry, what I...
View ArticleDay of No Fear Challenge
As I read this issue of Conversations, my thinking was jarred by Keith Matthew’s article, Fear of Missing Out, in relation to our having to be present to our technology rather than being present to...
View ArticleKnown and Loved
Having struggled with fear most of my life, I’ve longed to live the words of the apostle John: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). When I was in college I...
View ArticleSending Spectral Fears Into Flight
I wouldn’t characterize myself as a fearful or anxious person. But within the last year the fear of unemployment coupled with the fear of a cancer diagnosis hovered like specters over our house. They...
View ArticleFear Fears Love
I am petrified of stray dogs. I’ve even been hospitalized by “friendly” dogs. It’s like they pick me out of a humans line up as the quickest distance between two points: dinner and no dinner. I’m not...
View ArticleFear on Steroids
My husband drives our twenty-year-old Toyota pickup as we crest the top of the Cascade Range at Stevens Pass on Washington State Route 2 and start downward. I clutch the grip over the door. The next...
View ArticleCultures of Fear and Trust
Do you live in a culture of fear or trust? The first feels stifling, the second, refreshing. I always understood this distinction intuitively, but I first learned the words for it from my friend Gregg...
View ArticleComing Home without Fear
Depending on emotional/relational fig leaves to keep ourselves safe is not a very good strategy. First off, they don’t provide much protection and when they die, they dry up and crumble apart, leaving...
View ArticleWhich House Is My House?
Henri Nouwen said we can live in either the house of love or the house of fear. The walls of fear’s house are shoddy attempts to keep out danger, pain and displeasure. They take the form of...
View ArticleWe Fear What We Long For
You are a very complex creation, a living oxymoron. Your greatest longing and your greatest fear are one and the same – to be thoroughly loved. You long for it because it is what you were created to...
View ArticleFig Leaves and Fear
After the ‘fall’ Adam and Eve “clothed themselves in fig leaves.” Previous to the fall, they enjoyed unadulterated fellowship with God, each other and all of creation; they were “naked and not...
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