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| Me, in Bangkok |
I will be alone and silent before God. I will not fight these fears, but allow them to show themselves. I will identify them. I name them. Now they are out in the open, where God and I do business together.
Sitting before God in solitude and silence is my fear-removing strategy. There are many things I cannot do, no matter how hard I strive. Eliminating certain inner fears and anxieties is one of them. But God can do this. So I come before God, in my identified weakness, and trust.
Just naming my fears is a great victory for me, for I can sometimes have a fear of addressing my fears. This is a doubly fearful condition, which works to shut me down spiritually. So, this morning, I do what I have done for many years, and find that God is with me and working within me.
Ruth Haley Barton writes:
"Only those whom God has freed at this level are prepared to lead others into the freedom that they seek. Only those who have been brave enough to ride their own monsters of anger and greed, jealousy and narcissism, fear and violence all the way down to the bottom will find a truer energy with which to lead. Only those who have faced their own dark side can be trusted to lead others toward the Light.
This is where true spiritual leadership begins. Everything that comes before is something else."(Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry, p. 44; emphasis mine)
