Facing The Unknown – Part #1

Have you ever thought about where the roots of our fears come from? I was thinking about it the other day, and I am convinced that the root of most of our fears lies in the unknown.

For instance, I used to have a terrible fear of spiders. If I got close to a spider then I became almost paralyzed with fear. If I found a little tiny spider in my house or apartment then it would take me hours–literally!–to work up the courage to get close enough to it to kill it. The problem was, as more and more people found out about my fear I got more and more embarrassed!

So one day I decided to break the phobia. The way that I did it was to get on the Internet and research all the poisonous spiders in the United States. I learned what they looked like, what happened when they bit you, where they were usually found, whether or not they could jump, and whether or not they were aggressive. I found out every detail that I could dig up.

And you know what happened? It broke my phobia of them almost overnight.

That was when I first started to understand that my phobia was not really of spiders. My phobia was about what might happen if a spider bit me. I became paralyzed with fear because as soon as I saw a spider my mind started running through all the imagined possibilities. What if it could jump? What if it was aggressive? What if it charged me and jumped on me and bit me 30,000 times???

Those fears sound ridiculous now, but at the time they were very real. The problem was that I was afraid of what might happen. I was running through all the “what-ifs” in my head. “What-if” this happened? “What-if” that happened?

And you know what happens when we run through the “what-ifs”? Our mind immediately goes to the worst case scenario. Every single time. That’s just the way that the human mind works.

Now I think that most people in the world suffer from some form of irrational fear. Perhaps it’s a fear of heights, of snakes, or of spiders. But there is another type of fear that affects us all from time to time. Every single one of us. It’s the fear of the unknown. It’s emotional fear.

It’s the fear that comes upon us when a family member goes for a routine check-up and finds out that they might have cancer. It’s the fear that comes upon us when a child stays out late and doesn’t answer their cell phone and we wonder what might have happened. It’s the fear that comes upon us when we care about someone and we think that they might not return the feelings. It’s the fear that comes upon us when we’re involved in any sort of emotionally tense situation and we don’t know what might happen.

Whenever we face these fears our minds do what my mind used to do when I saw a spider: We immediately imagine the worst-case scenario. And then our mind starts to run rampant with worry as we imagine what might happen. We run through the “what-ifs”…and every single one of them is bad.

This spring semester I took a course by a man named Dr. Gary Habermas. He is an extraordinary man, and I enjoyed his course for a lot of reasons. One reason that I liked the class was because he was very practical. At one point in the lectures he told us that his first wife had developed terminal stomach cancer and died several years ago. From diagnosis to death was just four months; they had almost no time to prepare. When she died he was left with three children and a lot of doubt.

After he told us that he spent several lectures talking about what “applying theology to our emotions.” Basically what he was talking about was how to re-focus our emotions and overcome worry by using Biblical principles. He didn’t give a magic “self-help” formula or anything like that. He just took a Bible passage and broke it down into four steps that a person can use to change the way that they view their problems and to live with the “peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension” (Php. 4:7).

In the next five blog posts I am going to give each of the four steps that he gave. They’re not very long, but they can change a person’s life. I know, because they changed mine. It will be five posts because in one of them (the next one) I am going to lay a little more foundation for the four steps.

I have already written the blogs and set them to post over the next five days, so just check back daily either here at https://joshspiers.wordpress.com or on my Facebook notes if that’s where you’re reading this.

It is my prayer that the principles that Dr. Habermas gave will change your life and the way that you view your worries, doubts, and fears in the same way that they changed me.