Latest / The Daily Ripples Podcast / April 17 – Choosing Love Over Fear

Transcript

April 17 – Choosing Love Over Fear · The Daily Ripples Podcast

• 0:04
  Well, welcome back to the Daily Ripples podcast, everyone.
• 0:08
  We are glad that you're here.
• 0:10
  I'm Pastor Mike, and today I'm joined by nobody.
• 0:15
  That's right.
• 0:16
  Corey is out again.
• 0:18
  I don't have any guests with me today, so you're going to have to put up with a Pastor
• 0:22
  Mike solo edition Daily Ripples episode.
• 0:25
  As a quick reminder, the Daily Ripple is a stone of truth that ripples out into practical and spiritual application.
• 0:32
  The stone itself is taken as a nugget of truth from AA Literature's Daily Reflections.
• 0:39
  Like I said, Corey's been out this week, and we've had some great guests joining us.
• 0:43
  Larry, my fellow pastor and brother in Christ, has been with us for the past four days, and that's been a blessing.
• 0:49
  And then prior to that, Corey had sat down with Zach and Bill.
• 0:53
  So if you're behind on listening to episodes this week, it is definitely worth going back
• 0:57
  and checking out some of those prior episodes.
• 1:00
  But today it's just me, and today's ripple might call for a bit of a quieter moment for
• 1:06
  some of us, because what we're talking about today is personal, it's close to the bone, or
• 1:11
  at least it is for me, and hopefully it is for some of you as well.
• 1:15
  But let's jump right in with our daily ripple for today, which is April the 17th, choosing
• 1:21
  love over fear.
• 1:23
  The stone. Fear grows where love is absent. When I allow fear to dominate my thinking,
• 1:29
  it distorts my view of God, others, and even myself. Love restores clarity. Ripple one is
• 1:35
  practical. Today, when fear rises, I will not pretend it isn't there. Instead, I will choose
• 1:42
  the right action in spite of it. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to move
• 1:47
  forward anyway. The second ripple is spiritual. As I draw closer to the Father's love and follow
• 1:54
  the example of Christ, the Holy Spirit replaces fear with trust. The more I live in that love,
• 1:59
  the less power fear holds. Over time, joy returns where anxiety once ruled. And as always, we will
• 2:08
  save our prayer for the end of the episode. So, let's start with what are we actually talking about?
• 2:16
  and the word of the day is clearly fear.
• 2:20
  But let's start with that because what is fear really?
• 2:24
  I mean, I think that we all know what fear feels like, right?
• 2:27
  You can get a tightness in your chest.
• 2:29
  You can have racing thoughts that wake you up in the middle of the night
• 2:33
  or at two in the morning and a voice that's whispering in the back of your mind,
• 2:37
  you know, you're not enough.
• 2:38
  This is not going to work.
• 2:40
  Something bad is coming.
• 2:41
  Or as one of my favorite Star Wars quotes would say,
• 2:45
  I have a bad feeling about this. But fear is a universal thing because every single person
• 2:52
  listening to this right now knows exactly what I'm talking about. And it doesn't matter how long you've
• 2:56
  been sober or how long you've been in the faith, how long you've been following Jesus, how long you've
• 3:01
  been doing the work. Fear is still going to show up. But there's one thing that the recovery community
• 3:08
  and the Christian tradition have always agreed on, and it's that fear is not just an emotion. It's a
• 3:14
  spiritual condition. And in the 12 and 12 in recovery literature, the 12 steps in the 12
• 3:20
  traditions, you know, it says it plainly. It says, all these failings generate fear,
• 3:26
  a soul sickness in its own right. And it calls it a soul sickness, which is not just a bad feeling.
• 3:33
  You know, it's not just anxiety. It's not something that you could take a pill for to make it go away.
• 3:38
  You know, it's a sickness that gets down into the soul and starts shaping the way that we see
• 3:43
  everything around us. And the stone that we were sitting with today names it clearly. It says,
• 3:48
  fear distorts my view of God, others, and even myself. And that's exactly what fear does with us.
• 3:56
  It distorts reality. One of my favorite cliches out of the recovery community is,
• 4:03
  fear is simply an acronym for false evidence appearing real. The key there, I think, for all
• 4:09
  of us is that it's false evidence, you know, but it can convince us that it's absolutely real.
• 4:14
  And it doesn't just make us afraid, but it changes the lens or it's almost like a bad or an old set
• 4:23
  of glasses. We need a new prescription, you know, we need to see the world in a different light.
• 4:29
  And why, you might be saying right now, okay, you know, Pastor Mike, sure, you know, fear is bad,
• 4:34
  you know, I get it. Why are we got to spend the whole episode talking about it? Well, number one,
• 4:39
  one, because that was the daily reflection in AA for the day, and number two is because that was
• 4:44
  the daily ripple in what was written for the day. But also it's because I think a lot of us,
• 4:49
  and I'm definitely including myself here, have been living with fear so long that it can start
• 4:54
  to feel normal. You know, we stop recognizing it for what it is. Or to put it a different way,
• 4:59
  you know how it says in the stone that fear grows where love is absent. So I want to flip that around
• 5:04
  for a little bit because here's what I found in my own life and in the lives of the people that I've
• 5:09
  walked alongside, either in pastoral care or in recovery and sponsoring others. But a lot of the
• 5:15
  things that we do that are harmful or hurtful or that get us in trouble, they don't come from a place
• 5:21
  of malice at all. You know, it's not, I don't know of anyone who thinks of themselves as evil, but what
• 5:27
  it is, is we're operating out of fear. You know, these malicious things that a lot of us have even
• 5:34
  done in our own past, I think if we look back on it, we can see, well, why did we do that? Well,
• 5:39
  it's because I just, I hate, I hate, I hate. Well, I don't think that's any of us. I think it is,
• 5:44
  I was afraid that I wasn't going to get something that I wanted, or I was afraid that I was going
• 5:49
  to lose something that I have. You know, for me, I've been afraid many times, you know, especially
• 5:56
  early on in my life and career, and it rears its ugly head once in a while again, but that fear of
• 6:02
  not being enough. It was a fear that sometimes, you know, made me be more aloof or performative
• 6:10
  with others instead of trying to form a true connection, you know. I've had fears in my life
• 6:16
  of being abandoned, and that fear made me, you know, try to control others instead of trusting others.
• 6:22
  I've been afraid of what people thought of me.
• 6:24
  And that fear at times in my past made me dishonest,
• 6:28
  sometimes without even knowing it because I was being dishonest with myself.
• 6:31
  But fear doesn't show up, you know, for us wearing a name tag.
• 6:34
  You know, sometimes it's in disguise.
• 6:37
  You know, wears a mask.
• 6:38
  The fear sometimes puts on the mask of anger.
• 6:41
  Sometimes our fears put on the mask of resentment.
• 6:44
  Sometimes the fear can put on the mask of procrastination or people pleasing or even isolation.
• 6:52
  And we've been talking about resentment and anger all week.
• 6:54
  You know, Larry and I have been going deep on that, and that's where this all connects together,
• 6:59
  because the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous says it directly.
• 7:02
  It says, all these failings generate fear.
• 7:06
  That's in our recovery literature.
• 7:08
  The resentments, the anger, the self-pity, the dishonesty, underneath it all,
• 7:13
  if you dig down far enough, you'll usually find some fear.
• 7:17
  Fear of those things that we just mentioned, not getting what we want or losing what we have.
• 7:21
  And why it matters spiritually is brought to light from us from especially the Apostle John.
• 7:29
  You know, in the fourth chapter of his first letter, so this would be 1 John chapter 4, he writes that perfect love casts out fear.
• 7:37
  And it doesn't say that perfect love manages our fear.
• 7:40
  It doesn't say that perfect love minimizes our fear.
• 7:43
  It says that it casts it out.
• 7:45
  And that word in the original Greek, if you go back to study, is a very forceful word.
• 7:51
  It means to expel it, to drive it out.
• 7:55
  Maybe, you know, I've never performed one, to be honest, but maybe that's why exorcisms work.
• 7:59
  But I don't know that.
• 7:59
  I digress.
• 8:00
  We'll get into that later.
• 8:02
  But he goes on to say that fear has to do with punishment.
• 8:05
  So in other words, at its root, fear is tied to a belief that we're not safe, that something
• 8:12
  bad is indeed going to happen.
• 8:14
  It's that Star Wars quote again.
• 8:16
  I have a bad feeling about this.
• 8:18
  It's the fear that God or life or the universe is not fundamentally for us.
• 8:23
  And if I start to believe that, if I believe at a deep level that I'm not safe, that I'm
• 8:28
  not loved, that the verdict on my life is still out, then I'll live out of that belief
• 8:34
  every single day.
• 8:35
  I'll make decisions from that place.
• 8:37
  I'll treat people from that place.
• 8:39
  I'll show up to my recovery, my faith, and my relationships from that place.
• 8:43
  And that's why the fear matters, because it's shaping more of your life than you probably
• 8:47
  realize.
• 8:47
  And I don't know about you, but for me, I would much rather operate out of a place of love than to operate out of a place of fear.
• 8:56
  So if you're with me on that, if you agree with me on that, then our next question is, what do we actually do about it?
• 9:02
  And that's where we get to the practical part.
• 9:04
  And for me, whether I'm talking about these daily devotionals or whether I'm preaching on a Sunday or talking to others, I always try to come back and make it very practical.
• 9:15
  In other words, yeah, that all sounds great, Pastor Mike, but what am I actually supposed
• 9:20
  to do?
• 9:21
  So here we go, you know, and to be honest with you, there's not a five-step program for eliminating
• 9:28
  fear from your life.
• 9:29
  I mean, I guess you could say that there's a 12-step program for learning how to eliminate
• 9:34
  or cast out that fear from your life.
• 9:37
  But I'm a pastor and a fellow person in recovery, you know, I'm not a miracle worker, so I can't,
• 9:41
  you know, wave a magic wand or even a Bible and make it all go away for you.
• 9:45
  But the ripple gives us something real to work with, and I want to break that down.
• 9:49
  Because the first thing that it says is that when fear rises, I will not pretend it isn't there.
• 9:57
  And that's simple, but like so many things in recovery, simple doesn't mean easy.
• 10:01
  Many times it's quite difficult.
• 10:03
  Because the temptation, especially for people of faith, and especially for people in recovery,
• 10:08
  is to act like we're past our fears.
• 10:09
  To put on the face that says everything's fine, you know, to perform from a place of wellness.
• 10:15
  I know I'm tempted to do that myself at times, but pretending fear isn't there doesn't make it go away.
• 10:20
  It just drives it beneath the surface.
• 10:22
  And when it's stuck beneath the surface, at least in my life, it does a whole lot more damage.
• 10:27
  And the inventory process and the steps, you know, the fourth step and the tenth step, those exist for exactly this reason.
• 10:34
  Because you have to name a thing before you can address a thing.
• 10:38
  So step one, when fear arises, is that you name it.
• 10:41
  And I'm not talking about putting it all over your Facebook feed or your Instagram post and posting,
• 10:46
  woe is me about everything.
• 10:48
  Maybe you're just naming it to yourself, maybe to God.
• 10:51
  Maybe you name it to a sponsor or a trusted friend.
• 10:54
  You just say the thing out loud.
• 10:56
  I am afraid of this.
• 10:58
  And there's enormous power in that honest naming of what you're afraid of.
• 11:03
  And then the second thing, and this is the one that I think is most important, is the line that says that
• 11:08
  Courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to move forward anyway.
• 11:13
  And I heard this defined somewhere, I think I've shared it before on the podcast or someone has,
• 11:17
  that courage is doing the right thing even when you're afraid.
• 11:21
  Not waiting until the fear goes away, not waiting until you feel ready, but moving forward in spite of the fear.
• 11:30
  And that's where faith and recovery meet in the most beautiful way, because both traditions say the same thing.
• 11:35
  The steps say, act as if.
• 11:37
  And scripture says, do not fear for I am with you.
• 11:42
  Now, neither one says, wait until you feel completely at peace.
• 11:47
  Both are saying, take the next step.
• 11:50
  Or, as to put it back into recovery lingo, do the next right indicated thing.
• 11:56
  How do you know what the next right indicated thing is?
• 11:58
  Well, for me, what usually allows myself to be opened up for my higher power, the Holy Spirit,
• 12:04
  to speak into my life is repeating the serenity prayer. You know, God grant me the serenity to
• 12:10
  accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to
• 12:14
  know the difference. So whatever it is today that fear is keeping you from, the amends that you've
• 12:20
  made, the conversation that you've been avoiding, or perhaps the amends that you haven't made,
• 12:25
  the step that you haven't taken, or the prayer that you feel too embarrassed to pray, the invitation
• 12:31
  today in this episode is just to take the next step. You don't have to jump the whole staircase,
• 12:35
  just take the next step, put one foot in front of the other. And then there's the spiritual piece
• 12:41
  of today's Daily Ripple that reminds us that as I draw closer to the Father's love, the Holy Spirit
• 12:47
  replaces fear with trust. And quite simply, that's the long game in recovery. That's not a one-day fix,
• 12:54
  but it's the work of a lifetime. But I can tell you from my own experience, and I imagine many of
• 12:59
  you could say the same, that the more that I've actually pressed into my relationship with God,
• 13:03
  the more that I've focused on it, spent time in prayer and meditation, and not just going through
• 13:08
  the motions of it, but actually pressing into it, like putting my heart, my soul, my strength into
• 13:13
  the work, the less power fear has had over my daily life. And it doesn't just disappear,
• 13:19
  but it loses its grip. And I like to think of it this way. When you're standing in the light,
• 13:24
  the shadow falls behind you.
• 13:26
  And fear is like a shadow.
• 13:28
  It's most powerful when we're turned away from the light
• 13:31
  or when we're running from the light,
• 13:32
  when we're trying to outmaneuver the light.
• 13:35
  But when we turn and face toward the light,
• 13:37
  when we face toward God or face toward love,
• 13:40
  face toward truth,
• 13:41
  the shadow has nowhere to go but behind us.
• 13:45
  And that's where I can repeat,
• 13:48
  as Jesus said to Peter on that fateful passage in the Bible,
• 13:52
  Get thee behind me, Satan, because my fears are definitely of the devil.
• 13:56
  And that's the spiritual practice here.
• 13:58
  Turn toward the light.
• 13:59
  Turn toward your higher power.
• 14:00
  Turn toward God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit every single day.
• 14:05
  Sometimes even more than once a day.
• 14:07
  Because at any time during the day, we say in recovery, we can start the day over.
• 14:11
  And using Christian language, we say to repent.
• 14:13
  And both follow the same logic.
• 14:16
  Repentance, I always say, is simply turning away from the thing that takes me away from God.
• 14:21
  And for today, that is the fear.
• 14:24
  So spend time in prayer, spend time in the Word, in the big book, and in community, your
• 14:29
  meeting, your congregation, your people.
• 14:31
  These aren't optional accessories to a spiritual life.
• 14:34
  They're the means, the means of grace, you might say, by which we stay turned in the right
• 14:38
  direction.
• 14:40
  So let's land the plane for today in this episode, because here's what I know about you if you're
• 14:46
  listening to this podcast, is that you're someone who's doing the work, you're trying
• 14:49
  to show up, you're trying to take it seriously, and that means that you already know what fear
• 14:53
  feels like, because anyone who's ever tried to change their life has had to stare down fear in
• 14:58
  the face and do it anyway. And today's Ripple is not asking you to be fearless, it's just asking you
• 15:03
  to be courageous, and the difference matters, because fearless means that the fear is gone,
• 15:08
  but courageous means the fear is there, and you move forward anyway, because you're choosing love
• 15:13
  over fear, and that's bravery. And because you're choosing trust over control, and somewhere deep
• 15:19
  in your spirit you believe, or you're beginning to believe, that you are held by something greater
• 15:25
  than your worst case scenario, or to put it another way, that you refuse to be defined by
• 15:30
  your worst moment. Now let's go into our prayer for today. Our prayer for today's Daily Ripple
• 15:37
  says, Father, help me trust your love more than my fears. Through your Spirit, give me courage to do
• 15:43
  what is right and to walk in the joy that comes from following your son. Amen. And be sure to like
• 15:50
  and follow this podcast, share it with your friends and tune in tomorrow because tomorrow we have our
• 15:57
  other host, Corey, who's going to be giving us a solo episode as well. So you won't want to miss it.
• 16:02
  And until then, have a great day. And remember, you can start your day over at any time.