Don't Even Blink

What is fear? It's worrying about the unknown. It's not wanting to take steps forward because you don't know what will happen if you make the decision. It's being worried that as soon as you blink that angel in the corner who looks like it is weeping will attack you and steal all your potential life energy sending you decades into the past.

Okay, that last one is a reference to the totally freaky Weeping Angels from Dr. Who. The weeping angels are an alien race who only exist outside of recognition. If they are being looked at they do not exist. And so, they instead are stone statues who are non-existent. But as soon as you look away, as soon as you blink, the move and move quickly. This Dr. Who monster taps into that fear of what you see out of the corner of your eye. This monster taps into that fear of the unknown and the unseen.

Not only that, but this monster doesn't just take your life, it takes what you could have been. If you were to live for 80 more years, then this monster kills you by sending you back 80 years in the past and living off of what you would have been 80 years in the future. This monster taps into the fear we have about what we want to be and what we could be and eats it up.

Fear can make us do one of two things: 1) Runaway in abject terror trying to find your happy place or 2) use that fear to fuel you into action. The weeping angels forces you to focus. To focus on the fear and not let it over take you. To focus on what makes you want to flee in terror and instead stand firm, staring it down. With the weeping angels, you have to face your fears or die.

To be healthy, to be physically, emotionally and spiritually healthy, you need to face your fears. To stare them down and allow them to fuel you in moving forward.

You have a fear of failure and so you don't try to exercise. You have a fear of failure and so you don't pursue that relationship with someone you care about. You fear failure and don't even want to try to enter into God's presence. You fear rejection and don't want to even approach God through Christ. If everyone else has rejected you so will God you think. Or you fear rejection of family and friends as you step forward in faith to serve.

To run away from fear is to allow fear to win. You become a traitor to yourself, turning from what will benefit you and running away. Turn fear into a tool to allow you to step forward in faith, to step forward in making yourself healthier, to make yourself grow in the Spirit, to make yourself Grow in the knowledge of Jesus and God. To make yourself healthier mind, body and soul.

Fear!

So many times we have fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of being chased around a table by timber wolves dressed as circus clowns and all your wearing are socks and you're on a linoleum floor...okay, that's not my fear but I think it's a Far Side cartoon.

Fear can hold us back. Fear can make it possible for us not to take that step forward, not to try something, not to push ourselves a bit harder. I know for me, in weight lifting, I have a fear of hurting myself. It's a good solid fear, but I let it take too much out of me sometimes. I don't push as hard because I'm worried "what if." You know, what if I strain myself and my body's wrecked forever? What if I drop this weight on my foot and I have to lose a tow?

For me personally, fear has held me back in working out. Sometimes it's a good thing. It's not the smartest idea to try to bench press your body weight when 1)you weigh over 300lbs and b) you don't have a spotter around. That's a good fear. But at times, there's fear of not trying. Fear of not even trying a new exercise because of the what if.

don't let the what if take over. Instead, take it over yourself.

I think in many ways we're spiritually like that as well. We let our fear take over us and we're not willing to grow, we're not willing to live and we stay where we're at not moving forward at all.

I like this verse

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. 2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV

So, my question is this. Will you stay with the fear, or will you allow God to work in you to let you have this spirit of power over your life, a power to love yourself and others, this power of a sound mind, a power of self discipline.

Are you willing to step forward into the unknown or are you going to stay where you're at and not let yourself grow?

Walking by the (green) light

(Today's Spiritual Sci-Fi Friday is a guest post by a good friend Tom Speelman. I met Tom a good 4 or so years ago and can tell you he's more Geek-tastic than me.)

This summer, one of the things I’m looking forward to is the Green Lantern film. GL’s one of my favorite superheroes and hopefully he’ll become a favorite of a lot of others.

For the uninitiated, Green Lantern is Hal Jordan, an Air Force test pilot who’s brave, reckless, and cocky—pretty much every pilot/astronaut stereotype in existence. Anyway, one day while flying a simulator, he was summoned by Abin Sur, an alien whose spaceship had crashed in the California desert. The dying visitor gave Hal his power ring and told him he was now the Green Lantern of Sector 2814 (AKA our solar system) and would patrol this sector of space as a member of the Green Lantern Corps, the interstellar police force controlled by the Guardians of the Universe on the planet Oa. For about 40-some years, Hal did his duty as a member of the Corps (as well as the Justice League) and all was fine. Then came the day when Superman died.

A lot of you may remember Supes’ death in 1993. Some of you may even remember how he came back a couple years later. But in between, something happened that made Hal Jordan lose everything. In the wake of Superman’s death, 4 different heroes sprang up, each bearing a variation on his costume. One of them, a cyborg, was actually Hank Henshaw, a former astronaut who had been irradiated and could transfer his consciousness into anything metal. He masqueraded as “Cyborg Superman,” paving the way for an invasion by the alien warlord Mongul, who, with Henshaw’s help, blew up Coast City, Green Lantern’s home, and used it to construct a giant engine as part of a world domination scheme. Henshaw’s plan ultimately failed, but Coast City was gone.

Hal tried rebuilding Coast City with his ring, but was chastised by the Guardians for breaking a key tenet of the Corps: using the ring for personal gain. Enraged, Hal flew to Oa to absorb all the power from the central battery that fueled the rings of every GL, killing virtually every other Corps member who tried to stop him. He sucked all of the central battery’s power, becoming the villain Parallax. Years later, Hal temporarily broke free from Parallax, dying to save Earth. Afterwards, his soul played host to the Spectre, an old DC hero who is God’s Spirit of Vengeance. Hal pretty much vanished from comics after that until 2004, when writer Geoff Johns brought the character back to life and back to being Green Lantern in the 5-part miniseries Green Lantern: Rebirth. It’s a fun story that I decided to reread on Easter. As I read my little trade that afternoon, I couldn’t help notice the various parallels with Christianity.

Besides the obvious good v. evil/light v. dark leitmotif throughout, there’s a very insightful examination into fear. See, the rule with Green Lantern has always been that his ring couldn’t affect anything yellow. Rebirth reveals this is because “Parallax”, the name Hal gave himself as a villain, is actually the living (yellow) embodiment of fear. Basically a giant lizard, it was imprisoned by the Guardians in the Central Battery. Because of that, the GL Corps had a problem with yellow because Parallax weakened the ring’s power over the spectrum. Parallax was later awakened by the villain Sinestro and was able to affect Hal Jordan, bonding onto his soul. That kinda reminds me of the demon-possessed man called Legion Jesus met, who cut himself with stones and cried uncontrollably. But when that man was freed by Jesus, the demons left him and went and drowned some pigs. The man himself returned to normal. But the locals, Mark tells us, “were afraid.”

In Rebirth, even after Parallax is conquered and trapped by Hal and other Green Lanterns, many other heroes still don’t trust him, Batman being the most vocal. He repeatedly tells the other heroes about how Hal was always cocky, never planned things out, and, as John Stewart, another Green Lantern reminds him, “didn’t buy what you’re selling. Hal was the man without fear.”

It’d be nice to live without fear, wouldn’t it? That way, you wouldn’t be afraid of what school to attend, what job to take, who to marry, and how to raise your kids. You’d just know what was right.

But the simple answer is that we don’t know what the right thing is. Only God does. He knew, over 2,000 years ago, that the right thing for Him to do was to send His own son to give up His life for us.

Due to that sacrifice, we can all experience our own Rebirth.

My poor pick up, I'm afraid

Yeah. My pick up's down again. I love it. It's old and classic...and 3 years younger than me.

What's wrong with it? Leaking oil something awful. Went on a hospital visit today and it was running rough where the engine's going "chuggity-chug-chug-thump, chuggity-chug-chug-thump." And I'm thinking that's probably not a good sound. I did some auto shop back in high school, but that's because I was bringing in my 1977 Buick Skylark constantly to work on the breaks and repair the master cylinder. That's not enough to work on a classic like this thing. Grant it that back in high school I wasn't reflecting on the fact that the Buick Skylark was my age as well. You don't think about those things when you're in high school.

But, boy howdy, you sure do in your 30's. What's getting me is that when looking at my pick up, I'm starting to look at my own mortality. Don't know why I'm getting so stinking deep in a short blog, but yeah. That's right. I'm starting to see my own failures, my own shortcomings and it's scaring the bejeebers out of me. I don't want to fail. I don't want to mess up. I don't want to be curled up in a ball on the living room floor rocking back and forth trying to find my happy place.

While hitting the bike at the gym tonight (again, too tired right now to lift weights, so I'm biking instead) I was listening to a podcast by Lifechurch.tv. Been listening to them a lot when I do cardio. I was watching one of their podcasts on quitting fear. And yeah, I'm afraid. So, I must face it.

For me, I think of these verses

You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. Psalm 32:7 NIV

Unto thee, O LORD, do I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in thee: let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me. Psalm 25:1 KJV

And the one verse that kept hitting me over and over again

For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. 2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV

So I'm going to face my fears. No freakin' idea how right now..but at least I know what needs to be done.

As for my old pick up? Still working on that one.. do I take lessons in auto shop again?

What about you? What fears do you need to face right now in your life?