Lead Me Where

I get scared.

No, for real, I do. I suppose I’m telling you this now because it’s been a couple of weeks since really scared, since tight chest and rapid breathing, since frozen with terror and anxiety. It’s been a couple of weeks, and I’m feeling a little more confident. But confident or not, scared or courageous, I want to tell you about it.

It started when I was little. Maybe it was a movie, a dream, an invention of my own mind, but it was big and dark and lived at the end of the long hallway that constitutes the backbone of my house. The bathroom is also at the end of the hallway, and it didn’t take long to build a habit: use the bathroom, wash my hands, and then flee down the hallway, back to front room safety, as fast as I could.

It started there, and grew, little by little. Still in elementary school, fueled mostly by movies that I saw, my propensity to imagine fear grew. There were wolves in the space between my bedroom and the bathroom, mutant boars in the laundry room, orcs in the front basement, the same tall dark monster in the hallway. I never confronted these terrors, these imagined haunters of every place I went. I didn’t confront them, but rather pandered to them. I didn’t know how to control my thoughts, control my fear, and I watched as sources of fear multiplied before my eyes.

Crime shows, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings- I knew I shouldn’t be scared, but as soon as the movie was over, as soon as it was time to go to bed, the same feeling fell cold and still over my heart. Mind over matter, nothing’s going to happen, I told myself. I was in my own home, simply walking from the front of the house to the back. I was safe, I told myself. Sometimes I even believed it.

The problem, instead of getting better as I matured, gradually worsened. While the same frozen, petrified fear still gripped me, my imagination and life experience had expanded and by the time I was in high school I had a vast repertoire of real-life scenarios to be terrified of whenever the fancy struck me. Never mind that I have never been in any true physical danger; I was scared. It didn’t occur to me to fight back against the control of fear. So I walked fast when I walked alone, became wary of bushes and other suspicious-looking plants, and sunk a little deeper into the grips of fear.

And then this semester arrived. More than a year of riding the train for six hours a week had worn down my love of the Chicago public transit system, and my growing knowledge of the darkness in the world left me more on edge with every train ride. I dreaded those hours sitting on the train; I couldn’t read on the train, rarely remembered to pray, and instead spent my time like a tightly wrapped coil, waiting in breathless anxiety for what fate would befall me.

And every day, God was faithful to bring me back to school safely, where I would run from the bathroom to my room least the zombies/grim reaper/tall dark thing get me, and then curl up in bed with the blankets over my head, wincing and holding my breath every time something thudded in the hall. Fear ruled me, and I had no idea.

And then I had nightmares. Two of them, a week apart. The second one vivid enough to send me wandering down the dorm hallway, where I got in someone else’s bed like the child I used to be, and I cried while she prayed, until we both fell asleep. Now I was scared, scared of being scared, and slowly beginning to realize fear’s power in my life had gone far beyond normal apprehension. Someone said spiritual warfare, and I was rather inclined to believe them.

That last nightmare was almost two weeks ago, and when I woke the next morning, something had changed. I’m still growing, still shake and doubt sometimes, but I’m not a slave to fear anymore. There are Bible verses next to my bed that talk about fear, and the power that God has over it, and I’m starting to believe them. I might not be confident on the train, but headphones in, I listen to Chip Ingram sermons all the long ride, and I’m not scared, either. I don’t sleep covered up anymore, cowering under the blankets. The night after the nightmare, saturated in the protective prayers of those who knew, I laid down confident, blanket up to my chin. I could see the ceiling, hear the hallway, and I fell asleep. Safe.

I’m not saying I’m done with fear, because battles aren’t won in a day, but I can say that fear doesn’t rule me quite like it did. I’m falling deeper into the grip that God has always had on my life, and I’m growing stronger in saying no to the temptation to distrust, to fear. People are praying and God is patient, and I’m growing.

And the real proof of my growth? I walk back from the bathroom now.

~Natalia