Allay This Fear

Today is one of many harder-than-hard days in this fluctuating season of unease, and I know that I will face many more days like this in the coming months that will feel as trepidatious. As I fight my need to allay the intensity by distracting myself, I know one thing for sure: none of the many ways that I desire to resolve the anxiety within me will last. I must acknowledge the basal response of my system and call it what it is: uncertainty, anxiety, fear and these are temporary. Pushing in, I must be aware that with time these all encompassing emotions will pass and become a distant (albeit painful and teachable) moment in time. Today, all that is required of me is to remain.

God will fight for me.

I have never understood this so fully as this current season has required of me. Perhaps it is all of the times I have insisted on trying to fight for myself that have failed. The failed attempts to recover my sense of self through relationships that were not right in timing, or those many many demands I made of myself to be perfect and exacting. I have failed so often trying to gain the foreknowledge that would keep from unraveling my carefully constructed walls of self-protection that I have missed out on the inexplicable peace it is to remain.

The Lord will fight for you. You need only be still.

-Exodus 14:14

Now, don’t misunderstand me. All is not fine. Suffering is real and alive, and there are so many unknowns that are present in this life. What I want as a release and protection is very real and I am pleading for it to be so; I also know that God will fight for me, even as the outcome is certainly different than what I can imagine is best.

I have frequently misunderstood what it means for God to fight for me. I had assumed, as many around me, that the protection of God meant justice or at the very least a lessening of pain. As though God would come through like a night in shining armor to swipe evil away and make life right and safe. I believed in a theology that said that God saves and that meant rescuing from circumstance. In reality, God saves means that the deepest parts of me are awakened to a reality that God is within. That regardless of circumstance, that my protection is being intimately connected to the unchangeable, steadfast Spirit of God.

Today is a day of unrest, and yet I am resolved to remain because I believe the Lord will fight for me, I need only to be still.