Fear has a way of bulldozing its way into our lives. Uninvited. Unwilling to leave. Fear keeps us sidelined and imprisoned in puny thinking. Author Max Lucado shares the following poignant thoughts on the pervasiveness of fear and how courage and faith counter our angst, anxiety, and worry. 

The Big Bully

“Fear, it seems, has taken a hundred-year lease on the building next-door and set up shop. Oversize and rude, fear is unwilling to share the heart with happiness. Happiness complies. Do you ever see the two together? Can one be happy and afraid at the same time? Clear thinking and afraid? Confident and afraid? Merciful and afraid? No. Fear is the big bully in the high school hallway: brash, loud, and unproductive. For all the noise fear makes and room it takes, fear does little good.

Walking Out on Fear

Fear never wrote a symphony or poem, negotiated a peace treaty, or cured a disease. . . .Fear never pulled a family out of poverty or a country out of bigotry. . . .Fear never saved a marriage or a business. Courage did that. Faith did that.

People who refused to consult or cower to their timidities did that. But fear itself? Fear herds us into a prison and slams the doors.

Wouldn’t it be great to walk out?”

From Imagine Your Life Without Fear, Max Lucado, (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2009), pp. 11–12.

P.S. I’d like to add this to Max’s perspective on our timidity and uneasiness. Check out my Fear Everything or Face Everything blog that I wrote last summer. I especially like these acrostics for FEAR:

Forget
Everything
And
Run                         OR

Face
Everything
And
Rise