I am deathly afraid of the ocean. Something about the dark waters, and the unknown animals that linger below, give me chills up my spine. On top of that, I have an irrational fear of sharks, I cannot even look at pictures of them, so that just adds onto my fear of the ocean. The worst part about this fear is that I love the beach. I love being at the beach, seeing the sand, feeling the sun, and smelling the salt air. My fear keeps me from getting in the water though. I look around at all the people enjoying the ocean, I get in to about my knees and then the thoughts of a big shark coming and swallowing me whole, or being pulled beneath the waves and taken out to sea enter my mind, and I quickly get out of the water.

Fear is paralyzing. You can feel your fear in your bones. It gives you that increased heart rate, and you are in the flight mode, you want to retract, and you want to run. Fear is rooted in the "what ifs". Fear is addictive. We like to cling to what we know because the huge ocean of the unknown, it's so dang scary. It's more comfortable for us to stay in the shallow water, then possibly drowning, or getting swallowed up by something big and scary out in the deep water. Fear holds us back from just living.

What if we just jumped in the deep waters anyway? What if we didn't sink, and what if nothing big nor scary bothered us? God tells us multiple times in the Bible to not fear. (Isaiah 35:4, John 14:27, Psalm 23:4, Psalm 118:6, Deuteronomy 31:6, just a few examples of the topic of fear in the Bible). What if instead of fearing the fall, or the drowning, or the failing, or the big scary thing that might eat you, we just jumped and left our destiny up to God. Because if there's one thing I have learned, it's okay to fail, its okay to fall and scrape up your knees and elbows, it's okay to venture out into the vast ocean of the unknown, because you may realize it really wasn't that scary after all. You may realize that you can swim and you're a lot stronger than those waves that you thought would pull you under. You may realize, that big scary thing that you thought would eat you, it's a lot farther in the depths and you're not going to ever encounter it. Maybe you do encounter it, and you realize you can fight it off, and it may scar you, but you survived.

We have the ability to be free from this, if we just get in the water and surrender our fears to the one who is our refuge and strength.

xoxo