When I first became a tent-dweller I hid myself away from everyone. The shame I felt over not having the ability to be “successful” in life, drove me into seclusion. I made calculated efforts to avoid all contact with family, friends, and neighbors. Fear of others confirming my own thoughts of personal failure became enough to keep myself hidden away and out of sight for months. Every moment became a challenge to overcome. Each breath became an ordeal to get through. Every thought felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. The simple breaking of a shoestring became another hardship attempting to claim the better of me—another moment of deliberating my choices of succumbing to anger or of maintaining hopefulness. My life became a telling of minutes and hours rather than weeks, months, or years. I was ruled by Fear and I have come to know him on a deep level.
Fear tallies and rations out life. Fear collects the remnants of a shattered life together and measures them against the days that lie ahead. Fear rations what is left of money, hope, time, strength, and optimism—absolutely everything gets tallied. A simple optimistic thought had become an exorbitant luxury and therefore I refrained from showing too much optimism, fearing future lack. Like a farmer standing in a field counting the ears of corn the meager season would produce, calculating his crop against the days of the long winter ahead, I came to surveying the days to come with my close associate Fear and his scrawny cousin Futility.
Faith is the opposite of Fear. But they certainly are not unacquainted. In fact, they seem to hang around each other a lot these days—almost as if they are roommates. I cannot have a conversation with Faith without Fear jumping in trying to make a point. I like to hang around Faith much more than Fear. Faith seems calmer and less troubled by every little thing. Faith is not afraid of the future and has little concern over the “unknown”. Faith rests in the sure promises of God and in the extravagance of hopefulness. But faith can be agonizingly elusive. He'll take off without saying where he's going or where he can be reached—and that bugs me.
