For God has not given me a spirit of fear. But of power, of love and of a sound mind.

I remind myself of this a lot.  Over the years I have dealt with many different faces of fear. It’s been about 4 years now since we had someone break into our home. It was in the middle of the night and my entire family was there, sleeping.  The intruders left behind an axe that they had brought with them which was unsettling. But that wasn’t the only thing they left behind that day. They also left behind a heart gripped by fear.

It was almost 3 months later before I would sleep through the night again. Fear had found a place in my heart and mind.  It was slowly eating away at me. Like I said, I am familiar with fear. It’s something that has kind of followed me my whole life, taking on different faces at different stages of my life.  But this was new territory for me because suddenly a fear of mine had become a reality. And I wasn’t sure how to deal with it.

I would find myself bolting up in bed in the middle of the night, confident that someone was breaking into our house. There were times that I would go and check on my kids to make sure they were safe and times when I was literally so crippled by fear that I couldn’t even move. Sometimes I would wake up my husband and he would do a “check” around the house to set my mind at ease. Often we would pray together. But always I would find myself repeating scripture over and over again to help settle my mind. At times all I could remember was a single verse and so I would repeat it over and over again until the truth of it settled on my heart.