a little extra

Sometimes I dance. Sometimes I am brutally honest with people. Sometimes I buy shoes with a slight heel. Sometimes I give up. Sometimes I fail miserably. And sometimes I start writing with absolutely no idea where it’s going.

Sometimes I fear. And when I do fear, the items previously mentioned creep steadily to the top of what makes me afraid.

Fears:  Debilitating. Tricky. And often undetected in their elusive nature.

It seems as though fear has been the common denominator in every book, every lesson, every casual conversation that I’ve taken part in as of late. Do you ever feel what people might actually mean by ‘the audible voice of God’ is really the same verse, the same sentence, the same concept being repeated so many times that it feels like God is shouting at you? He has to get our attention somehow right? But when *fear* is the topic of choice Tuesday afternoon while talking with my sister, Tuesday night at North Central College, Wednesday morning in class at Willow, covered solely in a conversation I had with a friend Wednesday around lunch, and the subject of discussion at Naperville North Wednesday night… something’s up.

Last night I was spending some time with some teachers I know. These three have become some of the funniest, witty people I’ve been around.  After laughing and joking about how to pronounce falafel and telling stories of what it’s really like being a high school dean these days, the high school counselor among us asked what we were afraid of. Naturally. In the space continuum of Kristin’s crash course on fear, yes, it’s perfectly normal to go from joyous laughter to deepest fear with little to no transition. After sharing some of losing loved ones and trying to articulate what it could be or would be like when we’re no longer alive here on earth, I glanced over at a female teacher among us, currently battling for her life, diagnosed and in treatment for breast cancer. I asked her if she was more afraid before or after she was diagnosed. Immediately she answered after, and then thought for a minute about it. She sat, delicate, but strong and said that she was definitely afraid after, but those weren’t the same kind of fears she had battled before. The little ones seemed so insignificant now with the enormus feat set before her.

We sat in silence for a second, all trying to imagine her battle, her fears, her trust in something bigger than her diagnosed body.  In the next room, high school kids played a game of charades, acting out their biggest fear. Clowns, jack-in-the-box, and bees, were among the lethal bunch.  It made me wish I was fifteen again with nightmares of bees as the world’s worst pain.  And then it dawned on me that being fifteen might just be my greatest fear.  Wish revoked, immediately.

I’ve been studying the book of Judges in great depth.  And by great depth, I mean I read it once, hardly understand it and then, come Wednesday, I  ferociously write down every context clue and application nugget the teacher explains while in a class with my mom and sister. It reminds me of being in school with the teacher that buzzes through Powerpoint slides, novel-long, stopping only to ask, ‘are you getting this?’ Except this time, I am getting this. I’m processing in greater detail the reality of the ordinary mixed with the mystery of the divine.  I’m understanding how delighted God is to use very ‘normal’ people to accomplish impossibly abnormal tasks. I’m finding that being in a place that grips me with fear actually stirs up my soul enough to grip tighter to the hand of God.

I believe God leads us into situations that cause the rational fears in us to crave a supernatural, superrational courage.  Fear definitely causes me to run, but it’s my relationship with the living God that causes me to run directly into the fear instead of sprinting with all my own might in the opposite direction. So, at least for today, I’m gazing upon the scary in a whole new light, an everlasting light that makes the ordinary Kristin a little extra by the power of her extraordinary God.