Be fearless.

"Don't be afraid; just believe."

Mark 5:36 (NIV)

A few minutes ago I was working through my Bible study on the book of Mark. The theme for the chapters was looking at your fears. One of the opening questions in my study was to think of a time when fear kept you from doing or saying something you thought you should and to look at what you were really afraid of.

In reflecting on times when I am fearful I realized that most of the time my greatest fear is awkardness. This is irnoic because I find myself in awkward situations frequently, so maybe I should just quit being fearfull of it. But I am. I want to be liked. I want situations to be comfortable. Don't most people? 

Often the situations that I fear awkwardness in involve sharing my heart openly with somebody, inviting someone I don't know to church, or sharing the truth of Jesus and His amazing love and forgiveness. When I step back and look at all of those situations, though, I realize that past my fear of awkwardness is the incredible opportunity for someone to feel love or connected with or ultimately to know Jesus more. Shouldn't that be worth it? Yes! But I'm a real person and it is still intimidating.

I love that my daughter is fearless. She can walk into a room of people and make friends with anybody. When we are outside she will fearlessly run and play for as far as I will let her. She is not afraid of jumping on the couch (although maybe she should be). The only time I really see fear in her is when we go to the doctor's office and she remembers getting shots - so I guess that, like most of us, she has some innate fear of pain. 

I really, really want to be more fearless. More like Eva, and even better, more like Jesus. He approached many awkward and painful situations boldly because He knew that God was with Him. His desire for us is that we would be fearful so that we would have life abundant. How often do our fears stop us from something so much more awesome? Knowing that the God who created everything loves me passionately and is worthy of my trust should allow me to live fearless, believing in faith that He is with me every step of the way.

Finally, I just want to share that as I was praying through my list of requests I could suddenly see that almost every single request could be related to fear. I definitely did not judge the fear that these people face, but I did pray for those specific fears. So if you are on my prayer list, I hope that today and this week your life is blessed with faith and fearlessness!