Fear Is an Opportunist — Stop Letting It Take Over

Photo by Jas Min on Unsplash

Sweat dripped from my forehead and my hands ached as I moved yet another box of hydraulic fittings from the uncounted collection I had sitting around me to the shelf.

Mobile phones were still somewhat of a novelty and mine startled me when it rang.

A big change was coming, but I was out of town working and wouldn’t get the full story until the weekend.

All week in Idaho Falls, that phone call ran laps in my mind. I thought about it so much, I started to wonder if I was going crazy. I thought about the implications and my own real and perceived inadequacies.

That call made me afraid of what the future held for me.

It’s a familiar feeling to most of us. A tightness in the chest, mind racing a million miles a minute. My inner voice is never that quiet, and now it was on overdrive.

Don Johnson put it so elegantly:

Before you know it, fear is knocking on our door. It wants to get in. It wants to run the show. It looks for a weakness to exploit to establish a permanent residence in you.

There are, at times, big events in our lives, like the phone call I received, that fling the door wide open for fear to come in. Other times, all it needs is a small crack. Even when you think you’ve…