The Purpose of Fear, Part 3

When have you fought fear? When did you decide that you were not going to let it keep you from doing something you needed to do?

I don't know that I ever really have. I've dealt with fear, accepted fear, even learned how to walk alongside it.

But now I find it is exerting too much control. It is no longer willing to be an occasional guide, it is encroaching upon control. It seeks to lead, to depress my ability to make moral decisions out of my best thinking, out of the principles I have chosen to live by.

Am I afraid? Yes, I am afraid.

Afraid that this virus is even more powerful than we know. Afraid that the predatory economic system we have created will not be able to adjust to this weight, and will collapse, taking all of us along with it. Afraid, viscerally afraid, that I or people I love will suffer.

This last month, fear has grown like the mythic beasts of old. It is not just me, I hear it in the words of others. We can't think. We can't sleep. When we do drift off, it is to nightmares.

I refuse.

I refuse to allow fear to set up a permanent room in my house. There is too much work to be done. Love requires our action more than it ever has before, it is time to roll up our sleeves and get ready to be the hands and feet and voices of love. Perfect love casts out fear, and Fear, you are being evicted. I am choosing to diminish your power, Fear. I will face facts, face reality, but I do not have time to sit and converse with you. You have overstayed your welcome.

I will give my time to Love. Love has requirements I willingly work to fulfill, to act for justice, work for compassion, and walk humbly, aligned with the values I have committed myself to.

Fear, I will not give you my time.

I do not cede control of my life to the forces of fear that surround me.

"Fear exists for one purpose: to be conquered."

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