That One Healthy Fear

"The One Healthy Terror."  Maybe a strange chapter title, at first glance, for a book entitled Fearless.  I dove into it anyway, thinking I already had that "healthy" fear pegged, unmasked, & known.  Perhaps you feel the same.

Perhaps you know in head-knowledge & in fluent Sunday-School-ese that this "healthy" fear is a reverence & awestruck awe for the great I Am God.  However, as I read Max Lucado's words, I uncovered how small my knowledge base truly is & how I have placed a neat box of my own ideals, wants, & needs around this uncontrollable, in-containable King of all.  

It struck me, then, that when I pray "Father" & use such familiar a term as "Daddy," I am right in saying so, but do I ponder that this same Father God, to whom I lift my prayer, is the One who flung stars all around the heavens with purpose & order, & tenderly knit together every unborn baby in every mother's womb?  Who parted & unparted seas, & formed the loftiest peaks & every bumpy ridge of a tree trunk's bark?  Designed every mysterious unique swirl of every human beings' fingerprints since Eden & the first?  The One who can rain down wrath like none other, & still spreads across the sky a promising rainbow to this day?  The One who loves in such an immeasurable, incomprehensible amount, giving up His beloved Son for us, that all the grains of sands & drops of water upon the earth added together do not equal it?  

All of that {& more} is the One to whom at times I have cried out against, & doubted, & accosted, disappointed, made demands of, the One I have flailed before like a temper-tantrum toddler at a grocery store...  Whom I have hidden from those who need Him most out of my own fear, but fear of God in all His immeasurable power & might I have neglected.  I, in my deep sinful foolishness, have been afraid of so many things unworthy of angst.  Didn't Jesus say to not be afraid {again & again}?  For if we are to fear something, may it be that "healthy" revering fear of Him who brings us to our knees in love & worship.

Love,

-Bess-

"They fell on their faces & were greatly afraid.  But Jesus came & touched them & said, 'Arise, & do not be afraid.'"

-Matthew 17:6-7