A way to overcome your fears is to go right through them. It’s like walking through a thicket. You’ll get terribly scarred. But those scars are what we call “collateral damage.” They are the cost of the freedom you seek.
If there were no consequences for freedom, then there would be no freedom in the first place.
Freedom exists because of the presence of bondage and slavery.
There is the concept of freedom today because things, realities, and the world as we had it before have changed, and what we see as reality keeps telling us that all is not well.
There is nothing that looks normal in this life currently. At every turn, you are faced with different levels of bondage.
The bondage to survive
The bondage to impress
The bondage to be excellent and exceptional
The bondage to be courageous
The bondage to be strong and unsentimental.
Every time you’re required to do something that does not come naturally to you, that’s a sign that something is wrong. And if you have to force yourself to do something, it means you’re in bondage to the demands of that thing.
All careers are bondages, no matter how you see them or try to explain them away.
The fact that we need to painstakingly study to know, or eat to stay alive, or work to earn is a sign that we are enslaved, one way or another, to something.
The presence of ignorance is bondage.
Now you can understand why Jesus said that you would know the truth, and the truth would make you free.
John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
On the flip side, if you remain ignorant of the truth, you’re in bondage. To “not know” is to be “at the mercy” of that which you do not know. To be “at the mercy” of something is to be a slave of that thing.
All forms of ignorance are forms of bondage, be it academic, mental, scientific, financial, etc. We are all voluntary or involuntary slaves to whatever we do not have perfect knowledge of.
But Jesus said that if we know the truth, we will be free.
The word “truth” here is translated from the Greek “alētheia,” which comes from two root words: “a” and “lanthanō.”
“a” used before a word negates the word.
“lanthanō” means “to be hidden or concealed.”
When “a” negates “lanthanō,” we have the word “alētheia,” meaning “not concealed.”
In other words, Jesus is saying FREEDOM is found where there are no HIDDEN THINGS.
When you know that which is CONCEALED, you’re FREE. To unlock your freedom, seek to know that which is hidden or concealed. This is why you realize that the more you learn about God, the freer you become. Freer from the ignorance that keeps people in bondage.
And fear is mostly a sign of ignorance.
Haven’t you observed that people who have experienced something before do not get afraid when they encounter it again?
But when you’re doing something for the first time, because you don’t have the knowledge of the experience of that thing, you’re ignorant about the outcome. That’s why people are afraid of life, the future, marriage, work, etc. We all haven’t encountered these things before. This is our first time in existence, so we become afraid because we don’t KNOW what this is all about.
This ignorance makes you uncertain about what would happen or not happen, and that’s what is interpreted as fear.
Peter didn’t know what would happen if he stepped out of the boat. That’s precisely why he sank the moment he saw the crazy winds. But notice, he had already walked several steps on water before the doubt caught up with him. The steps he took before the fear arrived are proof that the water could carry him. His problem was the gap between what his feet had already proven and what his mind was still afraid to accept.
Think about what “collateral damage” actually costs different people.
For one person, it’s the friendship that quietly ends because they finally stopped shrinking themselves to keep the peace. For another, it’s the salary they walk away from because staying any longer would have cost them their sanity. For someone else, it’s the family gathering where they’re suddenly the outsider, simply because they stopped performing a version of themselves everyone else had grown comfortable with. None of these scars show up on an X-ray. They still hurt the same.
Therefore, one way to push through your fears is to go headlong into what you’re afraid of (of course, within the boundaries of Scripture).
You will get scarred.
Let me be sincere with you: you’d get terribly scarred. But as I mentioned earlier, those scars are what we call “collateral damage”; they are the cost of the freedom that you seek.
Again,
If there were no consequences for freedom, then there would be no freedom in the first place.
The thicket doesn’t get smaller the longer you stand outside it staring. It only gets thicker in your imagination. The only way it ever actually shrinks is behind you, once you’ve already walked through, scars and all, and you turn around to realize it never had the size you gave it in your head.
Some scars might even literally take you out of this physical world, but how will you know if you never tried?
As long as you did it for freedom, it will be worth it in the end.