Fear Less

When The Grand Girls First Met

When I first lived in California, I dreaded experiencing an earthquake.

 Having just moved away from the area known as Tornado Alley in Missouri,  my dread of tornadoes fueled my dread of earthquakes. 

Tornadoes were dread full to me.  We did not have a storm cellar or basement, and one afternoon my dad and I gazed out my bedroom window in horror.  A whirling mass of debris  headed toward our home.  "Is it going to hit us, Dad?"

 The  deadly swirling moved to the east and away from us, and my dad breathed in relief, "...no..."

By the grace of God we were spared, but the home of  friends several blocks away was swept away, and one of my classmates was killed when a barn collapsed on him.

However, in my first five years living in California, my dread of earthquakes, spawned from my dread of tornadoes was for naught.  I did not feel any earthquakes.

 I moved to New York.  One morning in the first year I lived there I was awakened because my bed was shaking back and forth.   Had I experienced an earthquake?  Later in the day, I learned that I had indeed experienced an earthquake, a relatively mild and non-destructive one, but an earthquake none-the-less.

The earthquake I felt, though mild by scientific standards, monumentally shook up my thinking.  I realized that I was not in control of the world around me, and that living in dread was a dreadful waste of energy.

Last week my oldest son, his wife and two little grand boys living in New York, and my youngest son living in New Jersey
 were subjected to a mild earthquake, and today they were spared when Hurricane Irene blew through their lives.

I "see through a glass darkly" when confronted by destruction, but the possibilities for loving life persuade me to dare to fear less.

This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son.  And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.  God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was.  He came to help, to put the world right again.  Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it..  And why?  Because of that person's failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.  John 3:16-18 MSG