Geoff, alcoholic. Buenos Dias!
I want to talk for a few minutes about fear. Not the big kind. The small, stupid kind. The kind that’s been running my life longer than I want to admit.
I’ve been studying this phrase in Scripture — “the fear of the Lord” — and I am trying to wrap my head around it. The Bible says that’s the beginning of wisdom. Not the middle, not the end. The starting point. And the fear it’s talking about isn’t terror. It’s awe. It’s what happens when you finally stand in front of something that big, that real, that trustworthy, and you go quiet.
Here’s the problem. That’s not the fear that’s actually been running my nervous system. It’s the everyday situations out of my control that I tend to treat like whack a mole and try to fix, piled on by the greater challenges. My wife wants to remodel, travel, upgrade something. My kid blows up my truck. The employee is a no show. The customer breaks down the same day he picks up his bike.
And when I finally saw it clearly — I mean really saw it — the question that hit me wasn’t “why am I afraid.” It was: why haven’t I loved? Why did I hold back, get defensive, get sarcastic, go silent, go hard — over something that, when you hold it up next to the size of God, is basically nothing? Absolute silliness. That’s the word that kept coming to me. Silliness.
I think a lot of us came in here trained. Not intentional lessons. But somewhere back there, most of us learned that certain places were dangerous. Certain tones of voice meant prepare. Certain questions meant you were about to get humiliated. And the body doesn’t forget that. It just keeps firing the same alarm for the rest of your life, at completely different people, in completely different places, who have nothing to do with where it started.
That’s the fear I’ve been living out of. Not reverence. Reactivity. And it’s exhausting, because it’s aimed at ghosts.
So here’s what I’m sitting with this week, and what I want to leave with you because I think this one doesn’t expire. What if the fear that’s supposed to anchor us — this “fear of God” thing — isn’t one more threat added on top of all the ones we’re already flinching from? What if it’s actually the thing big enough to put all the small ones in their place? If God is that big, that trustworthy, that much bigger than the guy who cut me off in traffic or the customer who’s mad at me or the sponsee who pushed back — then maybe I don’t have to spend my whole life managing threats that were never real threats to begin with.
Maybe that’s what it means to work a program. Not “stop being afraid.” I don’t think that’s the goal, and I don’t think it’s possible. Trade what you’re afraid of. Get small enough, honest enough, still enough in front of something actually worthy of awe — and slowly, the small fears lose their grip. Not because you fought them. Because you finally saw how small they actually were.
I’m still working this out. I don’t have it finished. But I wanted to bring it in here instead of waiting until I did, because most of the real stuff that’s changed me happened in rooms like this one, said out loud, before I understood it completely.
Thanks for listening.