When fear threatens to rob you of joy...

For as long as I can remember, I've been a "realist."  Never one to flippantly expect the best, I was always considering and aware of the worst case scenario, always the one who asked the "but what if...?" questions.  Always aware that for every good outcome, there were many ways that it could go wrong along the way.  And always waiting for the figurative "other shoe to drop." The dreaded "but..."

Marriage is really good right now, but...
We had one healthy pregnancy, but...
My job is really exciting right now, but...
I'm really excited, but...
I'm healthy right now, but...

When Jon and I got married, we took a pre-marital assessment (Prepare-Enrich - I highly recommend it) as a part of our counseling which, among other things, measured your "rose-colored glasses-ness."  We both scored off the charts... on the bottom end.  And in some ways that was a really good - neither one of us was/is deceived into thinking that marriage is easy, or that it will be all bubbles and jelly beans.  But our counselor at the time - who was very wise - warned us that in the midst of that "realism" that we actually need to have hope that good things will also happen.  In other words, to believe in the possibility of a good, beautiful, happy marriage, just as much as we were preparing for the hard work and refining.

Realism without hope isn't actually realism.

A few years ago, one of my spiritual mentors told me, "realism isn't the same as 'waiting for the other shoe to drop' - that's actually fear and pessimism."  Realism, in contrast, acknowledges also the possibility that the other shoe won't drop.  That a good outcome is just as possible as a bad.  That statistically, there's not a limit to how much good can be expected, or how much bad or hard must occur.  It's not counting beans - where you run out of one, and you only have the other left.  Fear expects and prepares for the worst, always.  Fear is always waiting for the good to end, and the bad to come.  Fear focuses on the what ifs and loses the other side.

Fear robs us of joy, it buries hope and declares it foolish, and it declares the verdict before it ever occurs.  All in the name of being rational.  And, when bad things do happen, it hinders our ability to fully grieve them, because our mentality is, "well, that figures... of course it was going to be that way."  Fear is self-protective, and self-deceptive.  It neither protects nor enables us to see "realistically."

I don't know about you, but I would prefer joy and hope, in balance with wisdom and good preparation, even if it is more risky than fearful security.

Sure, hope is far more vulnerable.  Hope requires that we acknowledge that it hurts when we fall, are disappointed, or bad things happen.  Hope requires acknowledging that we actually do want the good things which we want regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not.  Hope can be disappointed, whereas fear rarely is.  But hope actually allows room for joy.  For life.  And for grieving.

So what do we do, when fear threatens to rob us of joy?  And I need to make it abundantly clear that I'm preaching this to myself here as well - I don't have this figured out yet.

But, I think we start by asking the "what if" question... the other way.  What if, instead of the fear-filled situation...  what if, God actually has something good here instead?  What are the potentially positive, hope-filled outcomes?  Not saying we have to believe them, or know that they'll happen - or that they will happen, for that matter - but I think hope begins to grow when we deliberately create space for it.

And maybe that space is as simple as beginning with realism - the balance of both sets of "what ifs."  Without automatically shooting one down because it's "unrealistic."

And then if we're really audacious and really bold, maybe we look for what we can be joy-full about in the here and now, regardless of what might happen next.  And maybe we choose, deliberately, joy - for as long as it can be ours.   Without damping it with cynicism, or waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It's audacious.
It's so simple.
But it's so hard.

I have no idea how to do this day in and day out.  But I am wholeheartedly persuaded that it is better than living in a fear-filled "realism" and so I'm going to try and keep plugging away at it.  With joy.  :)

- KD