Opus 2025-495: Growing in Fear

One of the mysterious expressions in the Bible is the admonition that we should fear God, and it’s given as if this is a good thing.  Fear is good?  It can be.

When I was first born I was probably pretty much startled by everything.  You could think of it as a form of fear.  My brain was just a bunch of mush.  My physical coordination was not even a dream because I didn’t know such a thing existed.  My eyes couldn’t focus.  I saw this something waving around in front of me.  Little did I know it was my own hand, and I knew so little that I probably didn’t even know to be afraid.  But I was capable of being startled and surprised.  I would cry or laugh, depending on how the gas was moving through my body.

When I got to be a toddler, I could be startled again.  You could jump out of the corner and scare me.  My grandchildren do this to me all the time.  They love to catch me napping in my chair.  Yesterday my granddaughter just came up and stood about 6 inches away and stared at me until I woke up.  I won’t say I was afraid, but I was certainly scared.  When I hide around the corner and catch them unexpectedly we have the same scenario.  Again, this is a type of fear, but it’s based on knowledge that I’m secure.

All of that changed as I moved into being an older child and adolescence.  Suddenly, my fear of my father became a very real thing.  I knew that if I stepped out of line there would be repercussions.  I was spanked a few times, but being a good child, it wasn’t a big issue.  One thing that kept me in line was a dread of my father’s anger.

Let’s fast forward to my adulthood . I still had a lot of respect and fear of my father, but since I could out run him and had my own car, I wasn’t particularly afraid.  As I moved onward in adulthood, there was a less and less reason for me to have any reason to run away.  I see a very real parallel between that and the relationship between my son and I.

Fearing God goes through these stages.  As a child, I would sing the song, “Jesus loves me” and have a lot of fun with it.  I might sing father Abraham, and dance in circles.  It never occurred to me that the God of the universe might someday be mad at me.  I have gone through the different stages and I’m now at that point where I can sit down in the presence of the Creator of the universe and not even think about lightning bolts.  I don’t worry about swarms of locust coming out of the dark in the morning.  I don’t expect a plague to hit me.

Fear can be a wonderful thing when you know the source of that fear and know about His loving kindness.

homo unius libri