What if...we lived life fearlessly?

Wow, can you imagine how much more you would accomplish if you lived life fearlessly? Yet, we are constantly fearful. We fear failure, we fear what people will say, we fear our incapacities, we even fear that people will look at us bad. Fear is a crippling disease!

Fear is born from feeling powerless, unqualified, vulnerable or helpless. When we experience fear we believe that we are exposed to some form of danger. Consequently, we are convinced that we don’t have what it takes to protect ourselves.
The interesting thing about feeling fear is that often our first reaction is to seek protection or refuge from that which threatens our security. Therefore our natural instincts are: to take flight or to freeze.

We often “take flight” because we don’t want to deal with, or we feel incapable of dealing with a dreadful situation. And while taking flight is a form of protection it also put us in denial mode. We don’t know how to deal with it, so we take flight and ignore it, all in the hopes that danger will eventually just go away.

Typically, however, we freeze before fear. The danger before us seems undefeatable so we become paralyzed. If our frozen state were not bad enough, we find ways of justifying our paralysis. To justify our in-action we say things like: “I’m praying about it,” or “Just hanging on.” Don’t get me wrong, these are all good responses. The only problem is that this state of frozenness will limit our progress.

Truth is that, neither flight or freeze, although common responses, are appropriate answers to fear.

Believe it or not, our best response before should be to confront fear. But confrontation requires that we acquire a state of fearlessness. Confrontation does not necessarily mean conflict and crisis. Confrontation simply means that we will take action, regardless of our fears.
One of my favorite passages of scripture is found in 2 Timothy 1:7, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline” (NLT). To live fearlessly, is to live with the assurance that we have already received from God all that we need to face even our most deepest fears.