Fear Wanders the Future
moving from fear to love
Beloved,
Fear wanders the future.
Not in any way of being helpful. Not even in any way of being hopeful. Fear wanders the future as an excuse to protect yourself from now.
Protect yourself from...
loving (they won’t love me back),
friendship (they’ll eventually leave),
vocation (it won’t work out),
desire (the pain of disappointment will be to great).
Fear isn’t interested in a life. Fear is interested in numbness... because numbness is the quiet float tank of disconnection.
And when you’re disconnected, you can’t be hurt.
Well, that’s the lie Fear keeps telling us.
Love knows that your greatest desire is to flourish... and nothing can flourish without roots. You must root in where you find yourself... even if it’s not the place you want to be.
You are not rooting in the place you don’t want to be, but you are rooting in the you now. The you that can grow.
The you that is on their way.
The you that is becoming.
To wander the future is to bypass the becoming that is happening to you now.
Plant into your becoming, and let your flourishing future be the surprise you never saw coming.
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.
I like the idea of using your hands in a specific and meaningful way to express the prayer and thought. Helpful!