Gifts in Fear

Something hit me the other day after a morning spent reading One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. (Yep, still reading this one.)

The book is about how she finds 1,000 things that she is grateful for. Many are tremendously minuscule and if we weren’t actively looking for them, we’d never notice them. BUT she manages to pull something great out of the smallest tasks.

It got me thinking about if we can start looking at the things that cause us irrational fear and pull out one gift from it. For example, I HATE/AM TERRIFIED OF public speaking. Little gifts I’ve found from it are that feeling of victory I feel when I begin speaking. Or the fact that once I get started speaking, I want to talk longer. Or the release from fear I feel whenever it’s done. ; )

If instead of dreading public speaking when I know it’s coming, I thought about the little gifts in even the toughest circumstances, I can override the fears that gripped me in the first place. If I can find good in something, I don’t fear it quite so much.

Another example. Failure. A lot of people are afraid of failing. It holds a lot of us back. What if we recognized the gifts even in our failures? Like remembering the courage we always have to keep going. The gift of unconditional love we feel from our spouse even when we mess up. Or the actual gift that failure reminds us it’s not us who has to pull all the weight. God is working through us.

A personal fear of mine was working so hard on Val Marie Paper and having it fall on deaf ears. Gifts I had to find before even launching were:

1. The gift of the joy actually working those month brought to me. I could have had to spend the last few months working a job I hate. Instead, I enjoyed the process.

2. Finding satisfaction in the hard work that went into it. That glorified God, so even if no one noticed, a vastly more important purpose was served.

3. The gift of knowing God has a plan and, if this wasn’t it, there was something even better!

Fear can be powerful in our lives to HOLD US BACK AND CONTROL US if we let it. Some things are just too terrible to imagine.

OR it can be powerful if we USE it to our advantage. Think about those things that you fear or dread. Are there any gifts in them?

{ Original Photo }