Fearless

We live in troubling times. We have a media machine that likes to feed us with constant fear and we have a government that likes to feed us with constant fear and we are consumers, so we tend to have constant fear to some level or another. There are the lower ends who acknowledge it but press on and the upper ends who wear masks while driving alone in a car or hiking a mountain trail. There are threats on all sides, from school shootings and kidnappings of women and children to hate ... from all sides. Political, sexual, religious, economic, racial ... I don't think I have room to complete that list. Too many in our society don't even have a sense of right or wrong. They would as likely shoot you over a cold order of french fries as give you a dime (which won't help much these days with inflation anyway). The reasons to be afraid are many and everywhere -- manifold and manifest.

We all develop coping methods. Some use drugs or alcohol. Some acquire blinders. Some focus on one particular line of things to fear and indulge it fully; even participate. Me? I use a scarcely-used method. It is explained in a pithy little refrigerator-magnet statement my wife put up. It says, simply, "Fearless because He is faithful." David wrote the famous 23rd Psalm. Most of us know it in King James. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me" (Psa 23:4). Now, "rod" and "staff" are not generally thought of as "pleasant." They tell me that one ("staff") is used to pull a sheep to safety and one ("rod") is used for disciplining sheep. One is used in external danger and the other for dangers the sheep causes. So it is not necessarily the tools that comfort David, the sheep. It is the Presence that uses them. Even in the valley of the shadow of death -- even in evil times -- we have no reason to fear our circumstances. At least, not as long as we are sheep of the Shepherd.

We live in evil times. I suspect humans have always lived in evil times to some degree or other. Ours just looks bad these days because we've become immunized to it and then labeled it "normal." But we don't have to fear. We can be fearless, not because times aren't that bad or we are that good or capable, but because He is faithful.