Part One: What Are You Actually Afraid Of?
There is a specific kind of stuck that nobody warns you about. It is not the stuck of not knowing what to do. You know exactly what to do. You have known for a while. The business idea, the move, the job you need to leave, the conversation you need to have, the thing you keep saying you will start after the holidays. It sits in your chest like a packed suitcase by the door, and every month you walk past it and tell yourself it’s not time yet.
I have walked past my own suitcase more than once. And the part I want to be honest about is that I rarely called it fear. I called it patience, wisdom, and sometimes I called it faith. Faith is the one that really got me, because who is going to argue with someone who says they are waiting on the Lord?
“Waiting on the Lord,” let's talk about that verse, because a lot of us have been leaning on it harder than it can hold. Isaiah 40:31 says that those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength, soar, run and not grow weary, walk and not be faint. The version I read says "hope in the Lord," like anxiously waiting with expectation. That is a long way from sitting on the couch with the lights off and thinking about it or just being busy to be busy. Think about a waiter at a restaurant. A waiter is waiting the whole shift, and not one minute of it is spent sitting down. “Waiting,” in the way Scripture uses it, looks a lot more like standing at attention than like hiding.
I am not saying every pause is cowardice. There is a real season of waiting, and I have been in it. Abraham and Sarah waited for a promise until the waiting wore them down, and then they tried to help God along with a plan of their own, and that plan created pain that outlived both of them. So hear me clearly. There is fear that dresses up as patience, and there is impatience that dresses up as faith. Both of them feel convincing from the inside. Both of them let us avoid the harder question, which is what we were actually told to do and whether we already heard it.
Sometimes we did. Peter did not step out of the boat on a feeling. He asked, and Jesus said one word. “Come,” then Peter moved. A lot of us have already heard our word, and we are standing at the edge of the boat asking for a second confirmation, and a third, and then a sign in the form of a text message from a friend, and then maybe a sermon that happens to line up. At some point the continued asking is not seeking. It is stalling with good manners.
There is a parable in Matthew 25:14 that I think about whenever I catch myself doing this. A man hands out money to three servants before he travels. Two of them put it to work. The third buries his in the ground, and when the owner returns he explains himself with a sentence that stopped me the first time I really read it. He says he was afraid. That is the whole defense. Of course, before the words “I was afraid,” he gave some excellent excuse about why. Not that he was lazy, not that he did not believe in the owner. He was afraid, so he kept what he was given safe, and safe turned out to be the one thing the owner had not asked for.
In my line of work there is a concept called the statute of limitations. It is the law's way of saying that waiting has a cost and the clock does not care about your feelings. You can have the strongest case in the world, with the evidence and the witnesses and the injury, and if you sit on it past the deadline, a court will not even look at it. People hear that and think it’s harsh. I think it can be, given the circumstances, but for some, it’s honest. Time is not neutral. Every claim, every opportunity, every version of a dream has a window, and the window does not announce when it starts closing.
So what are we actually afraid of? When I sit with people about this, the answers usually fall into a few buckets. Some of us are afraid of failing, which is the loud fear and the one we admit to first. Some of us are afraid of succeeding, which is quieter and stranger and sounds crazy to admit to, so we don’t. Because success means being seen, and being seen means being talked about, and being talked about means somebody will have an opinion about the person you used to be. Some of us are afraid of losing the safe thing, the paycheck or the title or the reputation we spent years building, even though it has been quietly costing us for a long time. And a lot of us, if we are really honest, are afraid of what the people around us will say.
That last one is worth its own conversation, so it gets its own part. But before we go there, sit with this. The fear is not stupid. It is protecting something. The question is what. In my experience, more often than not, it is protecting a version of you that everyone around you is comfortable with. The one who stays put, stays available, and predictable. The fear is loyal. It just may be loyal to the wrong thing.
If you stopped asking for one more sign and just looked at the one you already have, what would you have to admit that you already know?