On the Other Side of Fear. Hallie Lord

day it occurred to me that maybe there was another way. Maybe instead of giving my fears carte blanche to manage my anxiety levels, I should stop for a moment and examine them. Turn them over in my hands for a bit, peer into all their dark corners, and then, instead of taking them at face value, laugh at all their silly, melodramatic ways. Because they are often very silly and melodramatic.

       Love the Bomb

      But then Stephen Colbert had an even crazier idea. What if, he suggested in a 2015 interview with GQ, we could learn, in some small way, to love our fears? Wouldn’t that be marvelous?

      “Our first night professionally onstage,” he said, the longtime Second City director Jeff Michalski told them that the most important lesson he could pass on to them was this: “You have to learn to love the bomb.”

      “It took me a long time to really understand what that meant,” Colbert said. “It wasn’t ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get it next time.’ It wasn’t ‘Laugh it off.’”

      “No, it means what it says. You gotta learn to love when you’re failing…. The embracing of that, the discomfort of failing in front of an audience, leads you to penetrate through the fear that blinds you. Fear is the mind killer.”

      He said he trained himself, not just onstage but every day in life, even in his dream states, to steer toward fear rather than away from it. “I like to do things that are publicly embarrassing,” he said, “to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone. I like getting on elevators and singing too loudly in that small space. The feeling you feel is almost like a vapor. The discomfort and the wishing that it would end that comes around you. I would do things like that and just breathe it in.”

      He stopped and took in a deep yogic breath, then slowly shook his head. “Nope, can’t kill me. This thing can’t kill me.”

      After reading that interview, I realized that I wanted to get to a place where I didn’t just grit my teeth and force myself to keep moving forward in spite of my fears but, like Colbert, I wanted to “learn to love the bomb.” I was pretty sure that was where I would find the greatest level of freedom.

      His interview also made me think of the often repeated question, What would you do if you had no fear? Or if you could not fail? And what things in life are worth doing, whether you succeed or not?

      That’s always been a bit of a tricky question for me. I think one of the things that has always stopped me from truly leaning into my fears is that I’m not always sure whether my dreams line up well with God’s plan for my life. I might be willing to take a leap of faith if I was sure that God wanted me to leap. But I wasn’t sure, so for a long time I was unwilling to take a step in any direction.

      Everyone kept telling me to discern God’s will to the best of my abilities and then jump. God would catch me if I were to fall, they told me.

      “But what if I mis-discern,” I replied, “and jump off the wrong cliff? What if he’s waiting for me on the north side of the mountain and I recklessly leap to the south?”

      “Hallie,” they said, “don’t you know that God will catch you even if you jump off the wrong cliff? He is everywhere — North, East, South, and West. Ever waiting to catch you when you fall. Which you will, by the way.”

      It took me a long time to understand this. Even longer to believe it. I nodded my head, so as not to offend, but secretly, deep down inside, I suspected that God would only have my back if I perfectly followed the path he had set out before me and got an A+ on all of my discernment tests. Knowing that I’m more of a C student in this area, I figured that I would probably head in the wrong life direction, stumble over a crack in the pavement, and find myself splayed on the pavement.

      Sure, maybe God would eventually come along and help me back up, but boy, would he be mad. He’d probably make me wait a very long time, too, in the hopes that my suffering might inspire me to bring my grade up a notch or two. No, better to stand perfectly still. Right smack dab in the middle of the path I was already on.

      But that’s not the way of God. That’s merely the way I pictured God behaving when I viewed him through a lens of fear. When my small mischievous boy climbs to the top of the jungle gym, pretends to be a fighter pilot, jumps from his fiery plane without a parachute, and ends up battered and bruised in the dirt, do I sit back and think: better let him stay there for a while so he learns his lesson? Of course not. I jump up and run to his side.

      How silly of me to not understand that God, whose love for me is vastly more pure and passionate than even my love for my own children, will do the same.

      Yes, God wants me to discern his will to the best of my abilities. But not because he’s a control freak. Rather, because he loves and wants only the best for me. If I mis-discern and get it wrong, as I often do, he’s not going be vindictive. Instead he will take me by the hand and say, “Let’s give it another go. What do you say, my girl?”

      Recently a friend of mine had a big decision to make. She, who had not held a traditional job since before she became a mother, had been offered an exciting career opportunity. One that would allow her to tap into her creativity and help others, but would mean big changes for her family. She was scared of making the wrong decision. Finally, after praying about it for a long time without receiving the clarity she sought, her husband sat her down and told her to go for it. He figured that the worst that could happen would be that she’d get a few months in, discover that she’d made the wrong call, and would have to quit.