I am excited to introduce to you my guest blogger for this week, Victoria York.

Victoria is an author, editor, wife, and grandmother of five. She is the co-founder of Manna Café, a ministry serving low-income families in Clarksville, TN. Her book 365 Devotions for Living Joyfully is available in bookstores. She is currently teaching a Bible study based on an upcoming book about her journey from fear to fearlessness. If you’d like to participate in the study, email Victoria at Doulos214@hotmail.com.

For her blog post, she has agreed to give us a sneak peek into her upcoming book, Seven Days of Fearlessness.

Are You Afraid of Not Being Afraid

In the spring of 2013, the Lord led me out of a lifetime of chronic fear and anxiety and into a life of God-centered fearlessness. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of sharing what He taught me with others. Something I’ve seen repeatedly (and which I experienced personally) is that most people initially balk at the idea of living a fearless life. In other words, they’re “afraid of not being afraid.”

As silly as that sounds, the apprehension is real. Why? Because we have certain delusions about the effectiveness and value of worry and anxiety. We’re convinced that fear serves us and even protects us, and, therefore, living without it seems risky.

One of these delusions is that worry allows us to control uncontrollable situations. We believe that if we mentally jump into the future and fret about something that might happen, we’ll be able to at least partially control the situation. The problem is that this never works. Case in point: My husband Kenny spends most of his days juggling the million responsibilities of running a nonprofit. It seems there’s always some complication that demands his attention. As a result, he sometimes gives in to the temptation to fret and brood. One day I asked him, “Has worrying ever actually helped you get a handle on a tricky situation?”

“No,” he admitted, “but I do it anyway. I worry about tomorrow so that I won’t have to worry then—and so I forfeit my peace today so I can have peace tomorrow … but tomorrow never comes.” Do you, like Kenny, tend to worry a day ahead of schedule? Have you discovered that your efforts are never rewarded and that you never reach the peace you long for?

Preemptive Fear

To some, it can feel downright reckless to forgo fear, as though fretting about the future is the mark of maturity. For decades, I convinced myself that if I played out every possible scenario regarding a potential problem (the more horrifying the better), I’d avert disaster. Again and again, my theory proved wrong, yet I continued to believe I was doing the sensible thing by trying to figure out all the variables ahead of time. Fretting gave me the feeling that I was somehow resolving issues, arranging details, and equipping myself for worst-case scenarios by imagining them. In other words, we chronic worriers believe that the way to put an end to our fear is by engaging in what I call preemptive fear.

Pain, sorrow, and crises are inevitable, we reason, so I’m going to take the initiative and get a handle on tomorrow by mentally hashing things out today. The end result is that every day is steeped in anxious thoughts. Do you see the absurdity of this mindset? We try to free ourselves from anxiety by engaging in anxiety! It’s a horrible way to live, keeping us in a frenzy, our eyes turned away from God, unaware of beauty, sucking the life out of our friends and families and stripping ourselves of serenity.

All the while, the Lord—who tells us that “whoever tries to make his life secure will lose it” (Luke 17:33, csb)—patiently waits for us to simply submit to His directive to Fear not. His desire is that we trust that the Fearless One has set up residence in our hearts, which means that we were created to live fearlessly.

Christ Empowered

If you’re a Christian, then you’re empowered by Jesus Himself. His attributes include peace, courage, humility, clarity, wisdom, and fearlessness. In other words, this is who you are in Him. “Christ lives in you,” said Paul to the Colossians (1:27, nlt). Let the truth of this verse sink in for a moment: if you’re a believer, the Fearless One lives in you. It’s that profound and that simple.

I can’t stress this enough: living the fearless life that we were meant to live as children of God isn’t about striving, wrestling, sweating, bleeding, yelling, begging, or gritting our teeth; it’s about yielding to the command to Fear not. During the first few weeks of my journey out of fear, I remember being shocked by the simplicity of it all.

Maybe you’ve imagined that victory over fear would feel much like swimming upstream against a torrent of water. Actually, it’s very different—more like taking a gentle breath, going limp, releasing all the tension in your limbs—and then discovering, to your delight, that you’ve floated out of harm’s way.