Fear: We will feel it, but does it have to rule us?

Fear. Ben and I are currently doing a bible study together on fear. Fear seems to rule my life. It is most definitely not the way I want to live. I want to live free from fear. Not allowing it to hold me back or keep me from pursuing relationships. Honestly, I want to get to a point where I choose to trust God rather than hold tight to fear.

Fear has never done me any good. I don't think it has done anything for anyone. It only serves to tear apart relationships, destroy the discipline to work. "Fear herds us into a prison and slams the door." - Max Lucado. And it's true: when you let fear take hold, all that surrounds you is darkness; light is not found in the presence of fear.

I am hoping through taking time to study God's word, learning what I most fear and how to battle it with scripture, and opening up with Ben so we can pray together, I will learn to let go and let God. Those situations I think I can control I can't. Those situations I fear turn me into a mean monster and allow me to trust no one, not even my closest friends, family, and fiance.

There is hope in Christ: 2 Timothy 1:7 - "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and discipline."

May our hearts and minds rest on this knowledge so when we fear a loved one being hurt, making a bad grade in school, failing at our job, failing our loved one or child, we will break through the chains that could confine us and live in the light of God trusting His will prevails in all circumstances.

Return, O Sleep

Return, O Sleep
Where have you gone?
You once were my dear friend
But now you toss me back and forth
Eluding deep, true Rest
You once were dear
And called me true
To fellowship with you
But now you leave me wondering
where wee morn hours hath gone

Return, O Sleep
I hear you beckoning
I dearly want to come
To sit a while in fellowship
As Rest wraps secure its arms
To find my hours of no memory
Have brought with them a dawn
A dawn of hope and blissful dreams
Of no more tossing waves
Of energy renewed

Return, O Sleep
Please be my friend
Of kindred hearts combined
To hold me sweetly, tenderly
As Nights come passing by
Protect me from the looming dark
Where Rest is swallowed whole
By Monster come from Neath-the-bed
Valiantly severe body from head
Return to me sweet Rest

If only every day was Saturday...

Yes, for some reason the weekend seems to just fly by. You can't make time move quick enough during the week, but your weekend you would love to enjoy and relax during just passes on by with a wink and whistle, thank you very much. I imagine a conversation with the Weekend going something like this:

"Oh I'm so glad you have come for a visit, Weekend!"

"Are you? I'm not here long. I've come to tease you."

"Come to tea..."

"Toodle loo."

And off it jaunters only to leave with the week ahead of you ready to be stumbled through. You don't have a choice but to tumble your way through it. It doesn't care if you didn't find all the rest you needed. Nor does it worry about how excitedly anxious you are for your wedding. It just keeps on trudging through the hours, minutes, and seconds. You begin to think seconds are minutes and minutes hours and hours days until your Monday becomes your Tuesday and your Wednesday your Friday. And yet by the time your Friday seems to be coming to an end, you feel as though those hours, which have become days, are really weeks.

Even worse is the speed your weekend always maintains so that days are seconds quicker than a blink and the begrudgingly slow week-month is ready to haunt before you can even begin to subconciously think of stopping the Weekend from leaving.

Thus it feels as though October is being pushed further and further away until you can watch it being sucked in by a black hole, never to return, always out of reach. I know it will come, but I am not feeling the "blink" everyone says it will be here in. I am feeling the week-month slowly turn into an entire year causing months upon years of waiting (thank goodness we weren't having to have a longer engagement than what is already planned).