Trail Mix
Introduction
When I was thirty-six weeks pregnant with my fifth child, a little girl we named Zelie Olive, my husband walked through the back door of our cottage by the sea as I was cleaning the lunch dishes, with comments about getting off work early that day quick to his lips. He ushered me to bed so that I could nap, but sleep proved elusive. I knew, the way husbands and wives just know after having been married for almost a decade, that there was something he wasn’t telling me.
Later that night, after our little ones were tucked soundly into their beds, sandy traces of the salty sea still sticking to their toes, he sat me down and broke the news. Earlier that day he had been laid off, effective immediately. His company, he explained, had become the latest victim of the financial crisis that had hit the Gulf Coast as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We were left with two weeks severance pay and less than a month of insurance to our name.
I spent the last weeks of my pregnancy curled up in a ball on our living room couch. My children took turns cuddling up with me, releasing the silly things that had been dancing in their heads into my ear, and kissing their newest sibling as she rolled and stretched beneath my ribs. My sweet husband brought me food, rubbed my feet, and assured me that we would be fine. Friends and family visited and poured love into our family in myriad ways as the summer grew later and hotter.
It was a beautiful, life-giving, love-rich time, but I barely experienced any of it. I had locked myself away in a dungeon of fear and anxiety, where my only companions were vivid worst-case scenarios that played in my head on repeat. I closed my eyes against the rays of light that attempted to break through the small prison window and silenced the voices that were calling out to me with words of comfort and reassurance.
When we are in danger, our instinct is to run and hide and then to curl up in a ball to protect ourselves from being hurt. That is the same instinct we tap into when we’re afraid. We hide away and then turn in on ourselves and wait, head down and knees in, until the pummeling stops. Do we escape some of fear’s more vicious blows when we do that? Perhaps. But we will never win the war that way. No one ever defeated their fears by hiding from them.
Do you know why fear stands behind you and whispers scary things into your ear? Because it doesn’t want you to look it in the face. It knows that the moment you stand up and engage, you will discover what it has desperately been trying to hide from you. You will discover that fear is a liar.
Fear paints vivid pictures of problems without solutions, sorrow without relief, mortification without mercy, and life without joy. It tells us that there is no hope and that our burdens are too heavy for any one person to endure. Admittedly, it does so in a very compelling way. But “compelling” is not synonymous with “true,” so these lies can only thrive when we push them down deep inside and hide them from the light.
This book is the story of how I looked fear in the face and discovered that its power is an illusion, definitively destroyed when held up to the light of God.
The following chapters can stand alone as each one possesses its own unique lesson. You can read this book from front to back or back to front or you can skip around. It can be consumed in one sitting, or fifty. You can even read it while standing on your head, if you like. It’s up to you.
No matter how you approach this book, though, I can promise you one thing: you will walk away from it knowing how to conquer your fears. It won’t happen overnight, and it will require a good deal of discipline, fortitude, and faith, but you will never regret having taken the journey. I wasted far too many years in the grip of fear, and I can tell you that no matter what it takes to overcome your fears, no matter
