How Fear Kills Your Future

I am an author. Authors write. Authors who write often have tons of ideas. Tons of ideas fill my brain every day. Tons and tons and tons of books stacked the ceiling of my brain. Millions of pages and pages and pages. And I am afraid of them.

The mountain of them forms a monstrous wall that paralyzes me. How do you climb on pages to get to the top? How do you pull one book out of the thousands—the one book I will bring to completion. This wall of fear shuts me down and sometimes incapacitates me to the point of not taking the next step, not deciding which books to give my effort and attention.

I realize this happened to me this year. After Sweet Grace came out, I had lists of ideas and books I wanted to write.  For years I had no ideas and now all of a sudden the creative thinking I believe God has gifted each person with came to fruition in my brain.

The enemy of my soul, though, didn’t like the ideas. He couldn’t erase them because they were already in my heart and mind. So he did the only thing he could. He told me it was too big of a task—that I was not equipped to take this on.

His biggest weapon against me is to overwhelm me completely. However, I know a God who has a bigger weapon than that. I know a God who has the power to move mountains. I know a God who can raise people from the dead. And if he can raise people, He can surely resurrect dreams.

When God formed me in my mother’s womb,¹ He gave me the gift of writing. The enemy built obstacles to prevent me from fulfilling the call of God on my life. In January 2013 God broke though many of those obstacles to propel towards the completion of Sweet Grace.

He brought a tribe of people around to help me get the book completed, formatted, launched and on Amazon. I could not have done it without so many who helped. If I start naming names I will forget some. But if you helped in any way, you know who you are and I am forever in your debt. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Now that my second book is almost ready for formatting, I came up against that wall again—the fear of completion. I asked God to show me the wall. It was comprised of books as high, wide and deep as I could see. I looked at it and a total sense of fear overwhelmed me.

In seeing the wall, I asked the Holy Spirit to reveal to me when I first felt this fear of completion. He showed me those who told me I wouldn’t be able to make a living writing books. They told me I needed a real job. It’s actually the reason I got a degree in journalism—so I could write and have a real job that made steady money.

When I forgave those individuals, the wall turned from a formidable wall of books to a wall of paper. Sitting in my car at a stoplight, I prayed, “Holy Spirit, please remove this wall of the fear of completion. I do not want it in my life.” I clapped once to seal the moment and as I did I saw a strong and powerful wind blow the papers away. They left the picture in my mind and all that was left was me and the Holy Spirit.