Stop Being Afraid of People and Shine!

One of the abnormal fears that you may have is people around you. 

You are afraid that your success or achievement might hurt their feelings. In order not to offend them, you play it small. You hold back. 

All your life, you have a fear of being the best, being on top, in the limelight, being the smartest because someone might be offended. So you sell yourself short. 

All the talents and gifts that you received from God are buried in the cemetery of unhealthy fear. 

There is nothing enlightening about burying your talents and abilities because there will always be people who will feel insecure around you. 

God has made you to soar and not to crawl. He has made you to swim and not to sink. He has made you to climb and not to fall.

He has made you the light of the world and He wants you to shine. 

Maximize all your talents and abilities and serve the Kingdom of God. You serve God better when you be the very best that you can be!

Today, God wants you to become the person that He wants you to be. So… shine!

In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:16)

Fear of Love

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. “I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.” Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

—C.S. Lewis (from The Four Loves)

For reflection — Matthew 25:14-30

Letting Go of Our Fear of God

We are afraid of emptiness. Spinoza speaks about our "horror vacui," our horrendous fear of vacancy. We like to occupy-fill up-every empty time and space. We want to be occupied. And if we are not occupied we easily become preoccupied; that is, we fill the empty spaces before we have even reached them. We fill them with our worries, saying, "But what if ..."

It is very hard to allow emptiness to exist in our lives. Emptiness requires a willingness not to be in control, a willingness to let something new and unexpected happen. It requires trust, surrender, and openness to guidance. God wants to dwell in our emptiness. But as long as we are afraid of God and God's actions in our lives, it is unlikely that we will offer our emptiness to God. Let's pray that we can let go of our fear of God and embrace God as the source of all love.

Henri Nouwen