I have a story to tell

this is a placeholder, to be edited later.

This is from a very good Bible study on the Bible app:

“There may be a lot of reasons for you to say no to this trip,” he said. “But please, don’t let fear be one of them.”

That one line exposed the truth for me. I was basing this decision on a storm I was imagining. In an attempt to avoid an unwanted consequence, I was allowing fear to push me around. Once I named the fear, it lost a lot of its power, and so I found the courage I needed to say yes.

Sometimes we’re afraid to move because we want to avoid an unwanted consequence. This is when our lives become marked by hiding from the potential storms of loneliness, failure, isolation, or invisibility. If we don’t take cover, then we might be overcome.

Since that experience I have learned to ask before every difficult decision: Am I being led by love or pushed by fear? We can’t prevent storms from coming, but we can decide not to invent our own.