I was reading through a Bible study recently and the devotional asked if the fears we live with each day are possibilities, probabilities, or certainties. This question stood out to me and felt so profound that I found myself returning to it and pondering it throughout the day many times.
2020 has been a year filled with anxiety and uncertainty for everyone - and it is only July. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the hate and violence that is happening in our country, and the intense feelings of loss and grief for so many people for so many reasons, there hasn’t been an absence of fear and discomfort. Unfortunately, there has been an absence of hope for many.
I also became a new mom this year in the middle of the mess of 2020. Yeah – talk about a fearful transition. Motherhood has been incredible for me and feels so purposeful and meaningful in my life. However, that doesn’t mean I am not fearful at times about the weight it carries to raise a child – a daughter – in our society right now.
I often find myself shying away from showing fear to the outside world. Fear has always equaled weakness in my mind, and showing weakness to the world feels so vulnerable and fragile. It took a lot of prayer, push back, discomfort, and more prayer to take on a new perspective about fear and see fear and vulnerability instead as empowering, humbling, and human.
We are all carrying around possibilities, probabilities, and certainties, but at this point – how can we even decipher which is which?
A lot of the time - almost all the time - my fears are “what if’s”. They are usually only possibilities, not necessarily probabilities or certainties, even though they can feel like both at times.
I am a recovering people pleaser - so being fearful of letting others down and being fearful that I won’t live up to someone else’s expectations of me are constant anxieties - especially when those expectations aren’t clearly communicated to me. Sometimes I think I am a mind reader…it’s exhausting.
I am still learning to live up to my own expectations and let God handle the rest.
Photo credit: Instagram - @brushandbarley
When reflecting on what possibilities, probabilities, and certainties I am carrying around right now I realized how heavy any of these can be on their own, let alone carrying multiple of them at the same time. The possibility that a plan might not work out. The probability that social distancing is the new norm. The certainty that going back to “normal” is going to look very different after this year.
It’s all heavy – but thankfully we don’t have to carry the weight alone.
No one person is expected to do everything, carry everything, be everything for everyone. Some days we just survive and that is enough.
God’s promise that we don’t wage war as humans even though we live as humans (2 Corinthians 10:3), speaks directly to my fears and to the many wars we are all fighting daily, especially this year.
I know it may feel as though the war is raging from all sides in 2020, but it is a human war and it isn’t our war to fight on our own. “We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments” (2 Corinthians 10:4).
What weapons has God entrusted you with? How can you use them to manage your possibilities, probabilities, and certainties? How can you use them to comfort others in the uncertainty of this year?