It was 8:00 at night, and as I settled in to read for a while, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a spirit of fear. It was an all-consuming fear of…well, I wasn’t quite sure. I just wept and prayed, “God, I’m scared. I’m so scared, God.”
As I prayed, the image came to me of myself standing paralyzed on railroad tracks as a freight train full of my worst fears sped toward me. I saw it coming, but there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do to stop it or even slow it down. It was going to hit me.
The fears began to clarify in my mind: getting older, watching those I love grow older, sending my daughter off to college next year…on and on ad infinitum as I considered the changes coming my way. There are so many hard and scary things that my fear does nothing to stop.
But through my tears, I heard the whisper of the Holy Spirit: “Jess, who says that freight train is full of big, bad, scary things? What if it’s loaded down with blessings?”
I began to process that, and I had a realization. When a train is coming head on, you can’t tell what it’s carrying. What you can do is trust the One who loaded the train, remembering what you’ve seen Him do before. We can do that much. We know Him. We know God so well, and we know that He’s good, He has good plans for us, and that He ultimately uses the scary and pain and hard and painful things for our good.
If we stand on the tracks secure in that knowledge, fear of what’s coming will dissipate. Might it be hard when the train gets here? Yes. Will the impact hurt? Maybe at first. The pain may be very real, but the faithfully loving heart of the Father is very real, too.
The blessings will be real, and friend, they’re coming right for you. There’s not one thing you can do to stop it.