Wahoo! You came back for more! I’m super proud of you because this fear-stuff is no joke. I hope you’ve had a great week of hashing out with God the amount and kind of fear you have. If you missed the first blog in this series about overcoming helicopter parenting, please check it out here. For those caught up though, let’s get to it!
Last week we worked on simply acknowledging that there, in fact, IS a problem. That’s a huge step. Getting to say the words out-loud is no small thing. This week we’re going to take the next step and identify some of the reasons we fear. In my book, I go into great detail about many of these roots but for this blog we’ll just skirt them a bit. (For the complete read, please grab yourself a copy of Helicopter Mom <shameless plug>. I promise it will revolutionize how you deal with fear!)
These next 3 blogs will all address certain factors in overcoming fears- call them fear-mongers if you will. These are the WHYS of fear as well as the answers to fixing them. As you read, see which ones strike a cord with you…
Trauma Drama
Friends, our minds are simply filled with trash- with blood, guts, goo, rape, violence, abuse, profanity, nakedness. The list of what we intake daily (by choice!) is crippling our souls and infecting our hearts.
Our culture adores blood and guts for some
reason. They get a kick out of the horror of it or the heartbreak of it. Walking Dead anyone?
They love the freakish nature of terror and letting the worst parts of their imagination get the
better of their sanity. Americans go in droves to theatres to be entertained by the morbid.
Weird… and wrong.
So much of our battleground fighting fear is in our minds. In our imaginations. And I
believe women, the female gender, is especially prone to breaks in the protection for our minds.
We, more often than men, live in our imaginations. The fight is for control of our thoughts. And,
gals, our thoughts are too often out of control! These blood and guts visions are not unlike those
distracting injuries I spoke of earlier. They are gory and scary and often can distract us from
what we should be working on. We are losing the battle for our minds because we obsess over
the fear and lose sight of the faith.
Mom’s fear trauma. We fear blood, broken bones, broken backs, broken heads, broken
hearts <yes, it’s a thing> broken skin, broken fill-in-the-blank. Our blood turns cold to think of our children
laying in the middle of the street having been run over by a car. Our heart stops
when we see them fall down the stairs and we’re sure their neck is snapped in two. Our thoughts
explode and tears spring up in our eyes to imagine them drowning in the pool. We are terrified of
these things! They keep us up at night and haunt our dreams. They cripple our days. One stray,
random thought can hijack an entire afternoon. One ill-placed news article on Facebook can
overcome our sense of the realistic and plunge us into the fatalistic. One sad scene from a tv
show can alter how we approach a certain situation. And before we know it we are already in
deep mourning for our child that has died some horrific death- if only in our (overactive)
imaginations.
We are masters of destruction in our own minds! We’ve become distracted by the
injuries. We have become slaves to fear- slaves to the vibrancy of our imaginations.
It’s time sisters, to acknowledge our pitiful state. It’s time to acknowledge we have not
been diligent in protecting ourselves from fear and worldly thinking. We have blurred the lines
between real and make-believe: by not taking every thought captive to Christ, by allowing death
and dismemberment into our heads as a way of entertainment, by allowing the images of gore in
our culture to permeate our minds, by allowing the fear of fictional situations and stories to play
out in our daily, non-fictional lives. (excerpt from Helicopter Mom ch. 4).
Oh friends! How filthy our minds have become! We intake the most horrendous things and then wonder why we fear that which we regularly and intentionally watch. It’s confounding when you think about it. Satan is using these shows, books, movies, etc to distract us from reality. Better yet, he’s using the make-believe to keep us pondering ‘what-ifs’ not the ‘here-nows’.
Distraction is never a good thing when it takes our focus off of Christ. EVER. He is a
jealous God and demands 100% all the time, every time. This is hard enough to do in a perfect-
case scenario let alone when we’re battling demons from our imaginations. I would venture to
say it’s impossible! So let’s start clearing out the trash, the blood, and the guts from our homes,
our families, our lives, and our own imaginations. This is indeed, a bloody mess, but let’s hang
out here for a bit. Look at it for what it is. Identify what it is, what it causes. You have to know
what you’re stained with in order to know what cleaner to use right mom.
So today we’re going to work on cleaning up and cleaning out.
What needs to go?
What do you need to examine in your life/mind that is creating distraction between you and God?
What shows, movies, books, music are you intaking that needs to go?
Are you a glutton for sob-stories and fatalistic accounts?
Are you filling your mind with scary and frightening images?
God calls us to a much higher standard than the world. We simply cannot dwell within in like the rest of the world.
Philippians 4:8 – Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable if anything is excellent or praiseworthy think about such things.
True
Noble
Right
Pure
Lovely
Admirable
These are high standards… are you meeting them?
Before we go to next week, we need confession and cleaning. Ask God to clean our your mind. Ask for help and accountability to avoid that which is contaminating your spirit. Fear needs no additional help from ourselves feeding it. Have our Father renew your mind and I promise all this distraction will not be for much longer.
Cant’s wait to see you back next week!
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