Hey, guys! What a week! We have been covering fear; the purpose of all this is to discover where fear has taken a toll in our lives and how we can overcome it.  This week we will be more focused on the opposite of fear, which is LOVE!  That’s right, more love; after all, the key to all things is love.  No, seriously the more I run away from love the more I seem to run right into it.  This week, I wanted to tackle the thing I feared the most in hopes to help you confront the thing you may fear the most.  Let’s get to it…

My Biggest Fear:  Hypochondria Depression

Depression can take many forms, but mine happened after my Pastor, Milca Plaud, passed on to be with the Lord.  I wrote about her in my “Nurtured back to Love” blog.  After her passing, I began to think: If God didn’t save her from cancer, He sure ain’t saving me from ANY illness I get.  That thought turned into: Maybe you have an illness now.  Later, after thinking about this enough, I began to see in myself the symptoms of different illnesses I read and thought about.

Hypochondria Depression is an abnormal anxiety about one’s health, especially with an unwarranted fear that one has a serious disease” (Merriam Webster’s Dictionary 2017).  I feared every illness (especially cancer) because it was what took my close friend and pastor away.  Eventually, the fear turned into hopelessness and my mind began thinking crazy stuff like…

“Why go to school? You are going to die anyway.”  

“Why lose weight? You’re dying anyway!” 

“Why eat healthy? You’re dying anyway!”

As I mentioned in week one,  I was raised to be paranoid with fear, with Milca’s death, now someone who really mattered was gone and I was afraid that I would share in her fate; if not worse.  I wasn’t in a happy place with my thoughts and I couldn’t shake it because I felt that death was staring me in the face.  Even when I praised God, fear would whisper in my ear “Why are you praising? You are dying anyway.”  I didn’t trust God enough to believe that He would fulfill what He said over my life, or that He loved me enough.  Fear was my “go to,” it became my familiar emotion.  It felt normal and justifiable, but thank God that He sent my husband Dave to point out to me that something was wrong.

How Does Perfect Love, Casts Out All Fears

As I have grown stronger in my knowledge of God and who He is, I have allowed His love to help calm my fears.  I was able to get to the root of my issues which wasn’t a lack of faith but a failure to believe that He really loved me.

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with torment.  The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18

Another aspect of the Hypochondria depression had me afraid of punishment from God because of my past actions.  For example, if I spoke bad about someone, I questioned if I would be punished.  There was a time in my life where this one individual hurt me so bad, so out of anger, I said to myself: Maybe God didn’t give her children because of how evil she is.  I would make fun of her and laugh at her situation repeatedly.  Today, I am struggling to have a baby of my own and I battled in my mind if I was barren due to my actions.  (Woahh, that’s the first time I’ve mentioned this out loud.)   These thoughts haunted me day and night as I thought I had an illness that prevented me from having children myself.

Depressed and hopeless, I went through all kinds of medical procedures that would confirm if, in fact, I was ill.  I asked God for forgiveness over and over again for those comments, but the unanswered prayer of giving me a family kept me in the belief that maybe God was punishing me.  I was afraid it was because I was not accepting His perfect love.  However, thank God for His Word.  It was through the scriptures that I began to find freedom from my thoughts and how I perceived God.  As I read His Word and studied it, I saw life and His LOVE differently.  I began to understand that He will do it.  He will complete what He began in me as He will with you.  When we fully understand His love and what we mean to Him, evil and struggles will still exist in this world but it will not cause me to be afraid.

Fear of Punishment

1 John: 4:18 clarifies to me that God isn’t punishing me, and He isn’t punishing you either. Our fear reigns when we struggle with the understanding of God’s love for us. This is why last week I spoke about changing our thoughts daily is such a necessary thing.  We are injected daily with negativity. Satan is called the “accuser”, and daily I lived accused by my enemy.  Can you relate to me?  Are there things you have done that the enemy convinces you that God is punishing you?  Well, I believed the lies and thought because of my past mistakes and shortcomings God would condemn me. Then I learned this passage, Romans 8:1

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death…but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.”

Thank the Lord for His GRACE and MERCY.  Without them, my sins would have sealed my future, as would have yours and all who have existed.  The new opportunities we are given through grace and mercy is because of God’s great love for us.  Fear, however, holds us captive into believing that God is constantly punishing you or condemning you for your shortcomings and wrongdoings.  If today you face hardship the reasons can be various, but know this.  If you truly are following after God, your hardship is not because He is punishing you.  Now, God may discipline us but never with evil intent.  God’s word tells us in Hebrews 12:2

“The Lord disciplines everyone he loves. He severely disciplines everyone he accepts as his child.”

There is no condemnation, but there is discipline; He loves you, so He will correct us if we need to be corrected.  Any good parent can concur with this logic.   I do not recall anyone who loves it when their parent corrected them, in turn, we might not like it when God may correct us, but it is very needed in order to reach the perfect design He has for our lives.  I, for one, am very thankful (after the fact) for God’s discipline in my life. I’ve done pretty horrible things, one of them being that I chose to make fun of and make hateful comments to a woman who suffered pain and anguish for being barren.  The depression I faced wasn’t God’s punishment, it was Satan’s lies holding me pinned down to the things I did.  John 10:10 says,

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.”

Our enemy desires to steal your joy (like he did with me), to steal your peace and keep you depressed and hopeless. Today you may say, “But Alejandra I have done pretty terrible things”. I can tell you today that I have too and if He chose to forgive me, He will also do the same for you.  This is the basis of our gospel, forgiveness.

Weekly Challenge:

Sometimes fear keeps us captive, to our past and our present. It does this by fooling us into thinking God is mad at us. But the truth is that God loves us so very much. This week as we have been uncovering the truth in fear I will ask you to search areas in your life where you may believe that you did something so wrong, that you are way past the line of forgiveness and I want you to forgive yourself. If God has already done so, then why should you keep yourself captive to this, it will only keep you in a mental prison.  This week read Psalms 51.  These verses were shortly after David had sex with another man’s wife, got her pregnant and killed the man to cover everything up.  David knew how to repent and God’s love kept him from him getting what he deserved.  Our actions have consequences, but the love he has for us protects us from the destruction we deserve.