Thrive!

What was this?

Water was running down the driveway, lots of water, hard, out of the house and down the drive!

 I hurried into the garage, turned the water shut off value; the water kept running. I rushed to my tool bench to grab a wrench. I had to  turn off the water at the street. What? My tools were gone, all of them, stolen!

A man grabbed me from behind. He had been hiding, behind the side garage door. I wrestled with him for a moment. It was the thief. He broke away and escape around the side of the house.

Running back out to the driveway, I could see that the water was beginning the undermine the whole driveway; the drive had begun to sink, several inches into the ground. This was serious. The house was next! I ran back inside to try to discover where the water was coming from. It seem to be running right out of the slab, in a corner,  as if a water pipe in the concrete had broken.

I ran back out in the street.  My neighbor was there.  I asked him if he would loan me a  crescent wrench. He seemed confused. He didn’t know what this was. He went away and came back with something. It was a breaker bar for a socket. Worthless!

I ran to the  concrete lid covering the water shut off valve in the sidewalk.   No shut off valve there, only a  a tangle of wires and plastic handles.

I could hear the water running, running, running.  I was in a panic.  

 I  sat up. Someone was in the shower; it was  morning.

Then I remembered that in the night I had gotten up because I had heard water running. One of the values on my sprinkler system had gotten stuck on, and I had used a screw driver to shut it off, and had gone back to bed, and the incident had morphed, in my mind, fueled by fear, into a major dream sequence.

Fear! It drives the mind, and behavior and my dreams.

I don’t like it.

It makes me want to unravel its tangle, move beyond it, triumph over it.

Fear is the worse motivator in the world. It drives the worst machinery of mankind forward — arguments, wars, greedy take overs, crime. Fear wastes huge amounts of resources — time, money, sleep,  people.

One of the main goals of the maturing person is to learn to understand and control fear, to use it, to milk it, to dominate it, to move beyond it to the higher motivation for life — love.

What does it take to not live in fear? How would it feel to not be afraid? What would you do if you were not afraid?

For starters, do this.

Get right up next to God, very close to God, trust God, trust his perfect love, a love so powerful it can cast down fear.

Get so excited and passionate about what you want to do that you drive your ramped-up desire right over the top of fear and do what you want to do even though you are  afraid to do it while you are doing it.

Get your butt kicked so badly by life that you end up so  familiar with hard stuff and so angry about it that you are too mad to let your fear dominate you anymore.

If you need therapy, counseling, medication, treatment go get it. Fear is not something beaten  alone. Go get what you need to get so that you can start doing what you need and want to do.

Force yourself to get out of the house, into life, interacting with people, going places and being with people. Action cures anxiety.

Fear and anxiety are treatable. They are something we all struggle with.

Got it? Do it.

For more thoughts and insights on fear, visit www.modernproverbs.net and click on the tab fear or record your own thoughts by bloging a response below.