Our fears are in proportion to our imperfections. How they weigh us down. How they prevent progress. How they prevent happiness. The more we lack, the more we fear. This is because the soul senses it is "not ready." There is a void.

What do you fear? Who do you fear? When do you fear? Careful: we sometimes attract what we dread the most.

Cast out the "spirit of fear."

As a priest was saying the other day, we need to take a look at our fears and then challenge them, confront them, dispatch them. Under the gaze of God, they dissipate.

To get that we must love. "Perfect love casts away all fear [1 John 4:18]."

To challenge a fear can be to do what we fear. We are not talking about tight-rope walking nor skydiving. We are talking about everyday matters that weigh us down.

Often, they weigh us down because we have become slaves to routine. Or, we imagine what is negative.

We like everything in a set order. Like clockwork. We don't want to stray from that order.

When we do, we feel uncomfortable -- even fearful. We lose our sense of security.

It is why we should go not so much by routine -- which can so badly restrict us -- as by the Spirit.

Easier said than done.

But miraculous, when we accomplish it.

Let His wind blow through you. Let it rake the leaves. Let God design your life.

It's when we design our lives in every minute detail -- disallowing for spontaneity -- that we get scared or unnerved if anything gets in the way of that routine.

We are not properly open to the Lord, Who moves in His own time-frame. He may act in an instant or over the course of many years (or millennia). Sometimes, only time can resolve a circumstance. We must allow a problem to be eroded by the sands of time.

"Time heals all wounds." It adjusts us. It matures us. It reboots us. It smoothes over the most intractable disputes, when we let it. It grants us new perspectives. Each grain of sand is an experience, an emotion, a thought, a correction.

God is "big-time." He is timeless. The music in Heaven is said to have no beat because there is no time there.

There is only time to praise God.

When we go along with His schedule, instead of ours, with God's chores, instead of a set pattern, His Spirit disintegrates the imperfections and as with dust blows away the fears inside of us.

--Michael H. Brown

[resources: Father DeGrandis books]

[Retreats: Indiana and North Carolina]

[Print article]