Unhelpful Drivers
When Fear Tries to Take the Wheel
The disciples were terrified. Waves crashing over their boat, wind howling, water everywhere. And Jesus? Sound asleep on a cushion.
"Teacher, don't you care if we drown?”
I hear my own voice in their panic. Don't you care about my diagnosis? My finances? My future? My loved ones? If you cared, you’d be doing something. I’d surely see you doing something. Not sleeping. If you cared, you could have skipped this whole storm in the first place. Don’t you care?!
When I was in the thick of my cancer journey I found myself to be far more afraid than I wish I was. I felt shaky. I remember using the image of a car. I was in the car, but my emotions and perspectives were in the car in varying seats. We have fear, anxiety, grief- certainly. But there was also faith, gratitude, joy, and love. A big ole van of emotions.
Pretending all my rough emotions were not there would have been a lie.
I remember thinking to specifically my fear and my anxiety- “you guys get to be in here, but you don’t get to drive. My faith drives.”
When fear gets behind the wheel of our lives, it makes every decision from a place of self-protection. It avoids risk, hoards resources, and isolates us. Fear promises safety but delivers only smaller and smaller circles of control.
Anxiety is similar. It’s focused on preparing. Preparing for the future fear that is not yet reality. Our imaginations are incredible gifts from God. We can imagine a future. We can dream, play, and create! But we also vividly imagine our fears. We can live in the unreality of the worst case scenario. We think we are being prepared, protecting ourselves by getting our ducks in a row. When really anxiety plays with imaginary ducks. They aren’t here yet. Unreality. Unnecessary fretting. And even when we did imagine the worst thing that does in fact come to be, it feels like none of that prep really helped anyway. You simply can’t be perfectly prepared for what you’ve never needed to walk through yet.
Freshly awake, Jesus responds to the disciples’ panic in the boat. He wakes up and speaks to the storm: "Quiet! Be still!" I imagine the chaos and noise of the moment (of which fear can feel the loudest) going to total silence and calm. I wonder what the silence sounded like in that moment. Then Jesus turned to his friends with the most important question: "Why are you so afraid?"
Not "Don't be afraid"—but "Why are you afraid?"
Our anxiety and our fears reveal what we believe about God and about ourselves. In this case, they call it: God doesn’t care and we’re going to drown. Our fear exposes the places where we've decided we're safer trusting our own white-knuckled control than God's goodness.
Here's the beautiful truth: God isn't sleeping because he doesn't care. He's at peace because he's in control of things you and I never could be.
The storm might not stop immediately. The waves might still crash. But the One who spoke the waters into existence in the first place is in your boat.
When you imagine your life right now, who is driving? In the storms of your life, how can you allow fear to have a seat, but tell it that it doesn't get to drive? How might you allow your faith to get behind the wheel?
"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you." - Isaiah 43:2