fear

It was just a bowl of popcorn.

It was also my ticket to a roller-coaster plunge into fear. A handful of that popcorn included an hidden hard kernel. A short scuffle with my molar, and it emerged victorious. And out popped my inordinate fear of all things dental: the costs, the cosmetics, and the possibility for pain. (I have some excuse: a past experience that was uncomfortably close to medieval).

Still, it seems pretty ironic, given the great trust I’ve gotten as a gift from God. I have so much hope in His plans for my unknown and much longed-for future. And yet, I cannot seem to trust Him with something as simple as my teeth.

Perhaps it reminds me that though I serve an all-powerful, all-loving God, He sometimes gives the nod to a little suffering. Or a lot. Like a young woman I know with a smile of great joy, a great love for children…and just a month or two left to live. She has no time for a family of her own. I think that for her, as for my uncle who also died of cancer, heaven is hanging low right now. I think she and her husband truly have joy in their suffering. But suffering they are.

My Abba knows my Achilles heel: the kind of fear that hits me hardest and most unexpectedly, as silly as it seems to my mind. He knows I scrape and scrabble and grab out for His hand. He knows I want to trust. I spend a day or two calling out to Him, in a silent conversation on what I cannot do…and how I know there’s no other way but to trust and obey.

And He says (so tenderly) “I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail.”

And it doesn’t. I flounder back up to the surface, and remember my last crisis, when His answer came flying out of the empty sky: so right, so real, and so unlike anything I could have dreamed up for myself. And I look ahead and shade my eyes and say, “This answer is coming too.”

It’s faith boot camp. It’s faith doggy-paddling, and faith breast-strokes and swan-diving into faith.

But at least I’m floating in faith, not in fear.