Delivered from Fear

You have stopped calling it fear, because it does not look like fear. It looks like rereading an email nine times. It looks like snapping at your children. It looks like lying awake building the arguments for a conversation that may never take place.

Think of it as water, because the psalm's own language keeps going that way and it is the honest picture. Fear is not a wall you meet; it is a level that rises. It gets into everything at the same rate, and you adjust to it, and after a while you cannot tell how deep you are standing because you have been standing in it so long. The man who wrote this had been at that level for years. He had run from Saul, and just before this psalm he had escaped a Philistine king by scratching on a gate and letting spit run down his beard until they threw him out as a madman. That is the man saying I sought the LORD, and he heard me. It is not a heroic story and he does not dress it up.

Notice the sequence, because it is the part that does the work. He sought, God heard, God delivered, and the danger did not go anywhere; two verses on he calls himself this poor man cried. The seeking came first, while everything still looked bad. And notice the reach: from all my fears. Not the respectable ones. All of them, including the ones that would embarrass him.

So the water. It does not drain because the weather improved. It drains because someone opened something, and the psalm says plainly who and says plainly that the asking came before the level dropped. Take the fear you would be most embarrassed to name and pray it in the exact words you think it in, untidied, and then do the thing it has been postponing.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 95 is To Whom Shall We Go (John 6:68).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna