I am not sure about saying this on the internet ….

But when I think of just your tender heart?

When Love sits down
with fear —
so many things
calm down.

I just need to quietly tuck these words into your hand, hoping they can maybe lodge in a crack in your heart and be used to fuse together and mend a bit more of the fractures of your own heart?

There’s a part of me that’s still that 5 year old girl who walked into her first day of school carrying a Neilson’s milk bag for her book bag and didn’t know what to do when she walked into the wrong classroom of grade twos, and her face flushed fiery red and she wanted the floor to open up.

Fear goes around relentlessly shaming, thinking if it piles on enough shame, it can flatten you till it reshapes you into being someone better.

And this farm girl who went to college in the big city, and was diagnosed with agoraphobia, that fear of avoiding places that “might cause panic and feelings of being trapped, helpless or embarrassed”?

Yes, she’s still in there, and you can catch a glimpse of her more often than now and then. There were several months, back when I was 20, that part of me needed some wise and good medication to regulate, and then later, therapy and a toolbox of helpful responsive tools.

And I can still low-key panic in a room full of minglers and dazzling extroverts, and feel the heat of nerve blotches breaking all up my neck. And yet what I keep discovering is:

Shaming those anxious, fearful parts of your souls — fails to actually calm those parts down.

And this is what actually, gently, helps: Instead of trying to beat parts of you into being braver, calmer, better — give those parts of you the beats of a greater love song to dance to…

Because this is one of the very deepest truths in the whole of the universe:

When Love sits down
with fear —
so many things
calm down.

When Love puts its arm around fear — so many fears melt.

Only Love Himself is large enough to enfold fear.

When Love puts its arm around fear — so many fears melt. Only Love Himself is large enough to enfold fear.

Frankly? Fear is one brute of a conniving monster, and fear tends to defend itself with the roaring mask of anger…. or fear disguises itself with a bloated, sauntering pride…. or fear goes around relentlessly shaming, thinking if it piles on enough shame, it can flatten you till it reshapes you into being someone better.

But for all it’s ferocious huffing and blustering and shaming — fear is small and finite. And it’s Love alone that’s infinite.

Only Love is large enough to hold fear, to carry tantruming, bullying, shaming fear to the curb — where Love will hold it and console it and calmly fold it into a safe space.

Honestly, I was this-year-old, this past summer, when I spent a handful of days, with a handful of women — and this interior fear part of me went wild, grabbing hold of this narrative and ranting loud down the neural hallways in my head, banging around in the chambers of my heart: I didn’t belong, I wasn’t enough, I was failing, failing, failing… as if fear wildly setting off all these interior alarms would somehow rally a rescue from somewhere else.

What refreshes your life — is the fresh wind of His love.

But then, unexpectedly, I actually felt the exhale of being rescued — because I could hear my rescue, the baritone of God, right there from Zeph. 3:17, soothing my soul with this most divine love song that came to the tender, anxious parts of me, like an enfolding:

“The LORD your God wins victory after victory & is always with you.

He celebrates & sings because of you,

and He will refresh your life with his love.”

The wooing love of God wins over the wounded and wound-tight parts of us.

For four days… I just kept repeating that singular verse, that refrain, that reality, over and over to myself, letting the closeness of His love console all the worried parts of me.

Because it turns out that you can be about shamed, labeled, ghosted, mocked, abandoned, cut off, humiliated, guilty, vilified, charged, devastated, grieved, wrecked, and left for dead in a million ways, and this is at the floor of all being:

“When you know you are fully known by God and still fully loved by God, nothing can truly scare you in all the world. 

There is a reason that God is Love and He is with us: Because this is what we need most. 

God is Love, and love is at rock bottom, love is underneath everything, and when everything falls away, and God is with us, and Love HIMSELF is BOUND TO us.

The worst-case scenario is that all the very worst things happen, and you are still loved — so there is no real worse-case scenario.” (~Excerpt from WayMaker )

In Christ, the real crisis is over, and you are soul-safe in Him forever. 

Because regardless of our age, 4 or 94?

It’s Love that wraps fear in the longest embrace — and all fears melt away.

What refreshes your life — is the fresh wind of His love.

You can rise to braveness, when you feel the depths of your belovedness.

And in that little retreat house with a handful of middle-aged women, where this 40-something-year-old woman didn’t feel like she fit, didn’t feel like she was enough, felt more like she was a flapping fish out of water, flailing for a rescue —- the small, afraid parts of me were found by the most elemental, primary song, the one I want my heart to know still by heart, right till my very last breath:

Jesus loves me, Makes me strong…
In Him, I’m brave & I belong…

And that little girl within me sang it over and over and over again.

And when more fears are hushed with a love song — you can finally live more brave!

I breathed deeper… smiled wider… and settled into my skin, settling into His love — all of me, and all the tender, anxious parts of me, held close.

I could feel it in the calm, steadying beat of my heart, beating to the sureness of His love song over me:

When you know Love holds you — courage takes hold of you and you rise to meet the moment.

You can rise to braveness, when you feel the depths of your belovedness.

And honestly? There’s no fear just saying it here or anywhere, that there is one song stuck here on repeat in my head…

The one song that makes me and all the honest kids brave.

* * *

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