October 2021 Articles

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Spiritual Corner, Faith Over Fear

Spiritual Corner Faith Over Fear

My students typically have a writing prompt, referred to as a “Bell Ringer”, to start my class off every day. Last Friday the prompt was, “What is your worst fear?” In every class there were people who shared their fears out loud. There were fears of being stranded in the open ocean, of snakes, of spiders. Some were afraid of isolation or losing family members. One said his greatest fear was death itself. I had a student in one of my classes ask me, “Mrs. Dana, what is your worst fear?” I told them that my worst fear was losing the people I care about or failing the people I care about. I thought that we all had a great discussion throughout the day as we discussed and shared our fears with each other. However, it wasn’t until a couple days after I assigned that particular writing prompt, that I started to really think more about it. I had thought that my fears were very real, valid fears to have. However, when I started to think a little deeper, I began to wonder what fears we really SHOULD have. One of my students (only an 8th grader actually) said he wasn’t afraid of anything except for God…because God could kill him in a second if He wanted to. While none of us typically like to think of God in such a violent light, my student had a good point. God is all-powerful and He COULD destroy us just like that if He so chose to. We should fear God, and while I don’t believe that fear should keep us from coming to God constantly with our problems and needs, I think it should cause us to have a very healthy respect for Him – which should, in turn, cause us to strive to always be obedient to Him (Psalm 111:10). This fear of God comment led me to another fear that I believe we should have. While no one answered this way in any of my classes, including myself, I believe we should fear not spending eternity with God and those around us not spending eternity with God. Hopefully, if we are Christians, we are secure in our salvation through Jesus and we are living our lives pursuing God wholeheartedly. This would allow us to not fear our eternal plans. However, I feel that we should fear for others around us. We should be deeply concerned with other people in our lives to the point that we are working hard to share Jesus and the Gospel with them at every chance we get (Philippians 2:4). Unfortunately, I feel that we (and I am SO guilty) don’t typically live with this fear at the forefront of our minds. We get caught up in our own little worlds and don’t take the time to remember that Jesus could come back at any second and we need to be ready and make sure others are ready as well. The truth of the matter is, when we have Jesus, we don’t have to fear the open ocean, spiders, or losing loved ones. When we have Jesus, we don’t even need to fear death. We need to always fear God and because we fear God and know that His judgement is real, we need to fear not taking every soul with us to Heaven. Then we need to live our lives dissipating this fear by sharing Jesus with every single person we encounter so that, prayerfully, those golden streets will be beyond crowded when all of our times have come. --Dana Alexander