What Created the Fears in Your Life?

In her beautifully written memoir Unafraid, Susie Davis reflects on fear after experiencing a school-shooting as a high-school student. It was after this that Davis began to experience regular bouts of fear in her life. Drawing from her own experience, Davis asks her audience the rhetorical question, when did we first experienced fear?:

I’m wondering, what are the things in your life God could have stopped … but didn’t? What was it that spun out of control to create the fears in your life? Was it personal? Did you experience something hard or painful? Or did something happen to someone close to you? Maybe your dad got cancer and died when you were twenty-five. Or your sister was raped in college.

Or maybe it’s not personal at all. Maybe you can’t help but watch the news from around the world, and your heart breaks for all the horrible things people have to endure. Yes, I feel it too — the broken world caving in on us. And sometimes, if I’m honest, it feels as if God is breaking a thousand tiny promises. There is just too much going on in our lives that doesn’t seem like “plans for good and not for disaster.” It feels as if God turns his head away for a millisecond … and someone’s world falls apart. Sometimes mine. I bet sometimes yours too. And that’s scary. It feels as though God somehow abandoned us. I felt abandoned that May day in 1978. Like God turned his head and my world crushed into pieces. I still loved God after the murder. I really did, but I didn’t feel like I could trust him.,