There is no spoon

"All in all you're just another brick in the wall."
-Pink Floyd "Another Brick In the Wall"




"Fear has with it the thought of punishment"
1 John 4

"What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world (all that the world has to offer and it's lies) and forfeits his soul (who he essentially is)."
-Jesus

*Fear keeps me from being who I am and becoming who I am. It fleshes out in a variety of different ways, but at the end of the day...it's fear.

*We often evaluate the risk of doing (fill in the blank "risk"). We rarely, if ever, evaluate the risk of doing nothing.

*Give me any person that life is working for them and you will see someone who walked through fear recently. Maybe it was 1 month...6 months...1 year ago. That person got to a place in their life where the dissatifaction of their life was louder than the lies keeping them stuck.

*I was sitting with Jerry and Steve recently talking about this topic over coffee. My latte was bumped and spilled a bit on the table. My thought was to put something over it...cover it up. Eventually, I cleaned it up. There is a difference between cleaning up and covering up. In order to really walk through fear...to clean up things in my life...I have to acknowledge that it's messy. I have to acknowledge that it's there and it's influence. If I just cover it up...I don't want to acknowledge it. Denial....is fueled.......by fear.

*The real question is what is the magnitude of fear in my life? Relationships? Job? Addictions? Life Choices?

*What would my physical life, emotional life, relational life, financial life, spiritual life look like if I pursued what God had put on my heart to pursue? What keeps me from pursuing it?

*Imagine being out in a field and seeing in the distance a large wall. As you walk closer, you notice more and more people camped out on this side of the wall. The wall seems endlessly high and long. As you get closer, you feel that it's a big deal. You hear voices whispering things that are specific to you and make you hesistate to go further. What would those voices be for you? You get closer the voices get louder...but you keep walking. There are so...many...people...who quit walking. Strangely as you get closer to the wall....it seems to fade. The voices are really loud. The wall seems to be disappearing.

"As long as you're struggling, like the Pharisee, to be alive in your own eyes--and to the precise degree that your sturggles are for what is holy, just, and good--you will resent the apparent indifference to your pains that God shows in making the effortlessness of death the touchstone of your justification. Only when you're finally able, with the tax collector, to admit that you're dead will you be able to stop balking at grace.

It is, admittedly, a terrifying step. You will cry and kick and scream before you take it, because it means putting yourself out of the only game you know. For your comfort though, I can tell you three things. First, it's only a single step. Second, it's not a step out of reality into nothing but a step from fiction into fact. And third, it will make you laugh out loud at how short the trip home was. It wasn't a trip at all: you were already there. Coffee, anyone?"

-"Between Noon and Three" by Robert Farrar Capon