Called brave while still afraid

I grew up in a divorced home with parents that didn’t agree on faith or much else.

Going back and forth between my parents taught me to walk very cautiously. I learned to say the right things in the right places and was often afraid that if I got things wrong, I would hurt people or get punished for my errors. This left me second-guessing, lying and often doing all I could to make everyone happy while staying as small as possible. This fear of rejection loomed in my life, but I didn’t see it until years later.

Fear rarely announces itself. It just makes us smaller. We keep our heads down, do what has to be done and hope nobody notices how worried we really are. Sometimes we even call it being careful. If that sounds familiar, there is an old story worth hearing.

In the book of Judges, Israel was living under the thumb of raiders called the Midianites. Whenever the crops came in, the raiders swept through and carried them off. So, a young man named Gideon did his threshing in a winepress. Wheat was usually threshed out in the open, where the wind could carry away the chaff. A winepress was a pit in the ground. Gideon was working in a hole, out of sight, trying to save a little grain before anyone could take it.

That is where God found him. The Angel of the Lord sat down under a nearby tree and said, "The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor!" (Judges 6:12). Notice the order. God called Gideon brave before Gideon had done one brave thing. He named who Gideon was becoming, not who he felt like that day.

Gideon's answer was honest, and not very polite. "If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?" Many of us have asked that same question at a hospital bedside or a kitchen table covered in bills. God did not scold him for asking. He simply said, "Surely I will be with you." Later, when Gideon was shaken by what he had seen, God spoke again: "Peace be with you; do not fear." Gideon built an altar on that spot and named it The-Lord-Is-Peace. The danger outside had not changed yet. What changed was that Gideon knew he was not alone in it.

This is harvest season in Bonner County. Gardens are being cleared, the last of the hay is coming in and the evenings are getting shorter. It is a good season for work and a hard season for worry. Plenty of our neighbors are threshing in a winepress right now, getting by quietly while carrying fear about a diagnosis, a job, a marriage or a kid who is struggling, and telling no one. You may be one of them. The God who found Gideon in a hole in the ground is not put off by where we are hiding. He comes close, He can handle our hardest questions, and He still calls out courage in ordinary people from Priest River to Clark Fork. Churches all across this county, ours included, want to be places where people can say the honest thing out loud and find help.

So here is one step for this week. Find five quiet minutes, name the fear you have been working around and say it to God in plain words, even if it comes out sounding like Gideon's question. You do not have to clean it up first. The Lord is still peace, and He still meets us right where we are.

Chris Bassett serves as senior pastor at Harvest Valley Worship Center just north of Sandpoint on Highway 95. Learn more at hvwc.com.