The Outgrowth of What Confirmed My Faith: Facing Your Fears

I have previously written about the story that confirmed my faith here. I followed that up with what I was saying shortly after this massive transformational event here. And then I talk about wrestling with the question of the origin of that conversation with that prophet here.

In this article, I want to give a little bit of a snapshot of how when this man put his finger exactly on the issue of my fear of persecution and my mental illness and asked, "If you call yourself a Christian, you could be persecuted for your faith. Is it worth it?" and I said, "Yes, it's worth it," had in terms of the effects afterwords.

You see, when I was more mentally unwell, I struggled with a great irrational fear. I was paranoid when I would go to sleep. I believed, on some level, that someone was in my room as I was lying in bed, and they (never knew exactly who they were, but I contemplated a few options) would do horrible torture to me. Now, this was in all likelihood never a real possibility. I simply made it up in my mind.

What's more, is that after this experience, even talking about it for quite a while was almost impossible. I would get super emotional just talking about it. Like a lump in the back of your throat. If you watch this video, which was the first time I publicly talked about it, you can't really tell, but I was upset, and it was very hard to talk about sharing the story.

https://youtu.be/NDdB06cNQCQ

This was all when I was more or less still very mystical about the whole experience. I had no idea what had happened to me in that conversation. It was my assumption at the time that I had what Carl Jung called an "Encounter with the Greater Personality." That was my conception of it at the time. At this point in my life, I am MUCH more grounded in reality and not as given to the mystical aspects of this experience. It's as though I have had time to settle and think about it, where my emotions are no longer heightened about it.

But this introduced a whole new way to think about things. The encounter did something very transformative for me. You see, as I had to wrestle with my greatest fear, as you can expect, that will have some effect on other fears you may have.

So, that leaves us with this: The great paranoia I used to experience very frequently at night began to be challenged. If I can face my greatest fear, then naturally, it would have an effect on other fears. I started challenging the fear. Instead of wallowing in my fear with paranoia, I would actually look to see if anyone was there. And of course, no one was ever there. So, little by little, as I began to fight my fears instead of being a victim of them, it changed the way I view things. I became bold in facing my fears. My brain chemistry and response to fear started to radically change over time.

I'd love to know what exactly the mechanism was for starting to fight your fears so that I could help others overcome their fears, but I believe part of it is telling yourself, "I am afraid right now. That does not mean I need to be paralyzed by my fear. I can face whatever danger there is with bravery."

Jordan Peterson has talked about this in some of his work, where part of clinical psychology is to train people to face their fears voluntarily. Instead of being victim to your fears and letting them rule your life, you, with the help of your psychologist, will go through exercises of exposure to what makes you afraid, and you will voluntarily face the thing that is making you afraid. According to Peterson, this doesn't necessarily make you less afraid, but instead, it makes you more courageous in fighting your fears and not letting them rule your life.

But in my case, it is not only at this time that I am simply more brave or courageous about facing my fears. Rather, facing them has had a profound effect on being afraid at all. Now, it is very, very rare that I deal with any sort of paranoia at all at night in bed, which used to keep me up, and I would lose a lot of sleep over my fears.

In all this, I think many Christians in the US today have no conception of fighting their fears and don't even think about being persecuted for their faith. This makes for an immature and childish faith. Rather than being willing to suffer persecution for their faith, Christians in the US today are all hot and bothered by the simple disruption of a church service. The differences between protestors entering a church service and disrupting it (which happened in my state recently at Cities Church in Minneapolis) and the Christians in Nigeria, which is often a matter of life and death, can hardly be quantified. One is more or less a change of plans, and the other is not knowing if you are going to wake up tomorrow or if someone will kill you in your sleep for being a Christian.

This is why I have been urging Christians in the US to count the cost of their salvation. Persecution has been the norm for Christians for 2,000 years. With the persecution against Christians globally today higher than it has ever been, and the fact that it is only getting worse over time, it is only a matter of time until real persecution comes to the US. This belief I have is only confirmed over and over in the news. There was a story of a street preacher who was literally shot in the head for street preaching. Then, there was the man who was literally on his way into church, and he was gunned down in cold blood. Then there was, most recently, a man whose only crime was that when asked what religion he was, he said he was a Christian, and was stabbed by the person who asked him that.

In all this, my message is simple: There may come a time when Christians in the US are persecuted. I simply ask to count the cost before it happens so that you will be equipped to handle any kind of persecution should it arise someday.

That's it for this one!

God bless you! Until next time!