Fear Hates Vulnerability
moving from fear to love
Beloved,
You have a song to sing.
You do. You really do.
You know the one. It’s that one you’re afraid of still being in you when you die. Yet there are all these precursors you feel you need to accomplish in order to sing that song.
The right mood.
The right surroundings.
The right sound check.
Everything must be perfect.
Fear has convinced you that the only time to sing is when everything is perfect... as if the goal of a song was perfection.
Beloved, the goal of a song is not perfection. The goal of a song is Love.
What does it mean to sing?
We’ve obviously been talking in metaphor, but seriously, what does it mean to sing? You must take air in your lungs and push it out through your larynx while controlling the pitch and wording with your mouth and tongue. But not only is it your body parts that are important, it’s your mind, heart, and invisible soul that make a song truly a great song.
Fear is convinced that the best way to deal with your vulnerabilities is through hiding them under the thick casing of perfection.
But Love has seen that the best way to deal with our vulnerabilities is to sing our song THROUGH them. Passing through your heartbreaks, doubts, passions, failures, secrets, off key pitches, and joys as well your unique physical makeup is what makes your song truly special.
You are the medium for your great song.
Fear wants you to wait for the right time to start.
Love wants you to just start singing.
This is part of a series of prayerful hand gestures representing a move from Fear to Love.
I started developing these at a certain season of my life where I was overwhelmed by anxiety and fear. Fear is the opposite of Love. It draws us away instead of drawing us in. It builds distrust instead of developing trust. It alienates instead of consummates (can I say that? Just really got into the rhyming bit). Fear was selling me narratives all day long about how nothing was going to turn out and I was all alone in it. I knew I needed to move from Fear to Love.
According to the holy scriptures, God is Love. So when we endeavor to listen to the Voice of God we are listening to the Voice of Love. I wanted to move from the arguments of Fear to the invitation of Love. I needed some new and specific prayers.
But word prayers were not enough. The anxiety was in my body and so my body needed a way to pray as well. I started to take the arguments of Fear and embody them through hand gestures. Then I came up with a corresponding hand gesture for the invitation of Love. I began doing these throughout they day whenever I felt overwhelmed by Fear and anxiety... and they really worked for me.
All these prayers are collected in an ebook available here.
Thank you! Yes I really do have a song to sing. I was inspired to write it many years ago at a time when at least half of it was prophetic - - its called ‘Finding pearls in God’s Care’ - taking the promises of God to the Jews through various prophets- and reflecting what it feels like humanly but the inner work that it produces. Eventually I found a suitable person to write the music - and now I am letting my body and soul start to live it and sing it!!
Thank you again for the reminder.