2-minute read
Here’s the truth—you are not meant to live this life in persistent cycles of fear and anxiety.
Fear has it’s place as a survival mechanism, but it’s not meant to dominate your life.
Anxiety is similar. As human beings we have the unique ability to project our thoughts into the future to consider various eventualities and outcomes. But it’s one thing to plan ahead, and a very different thing to become entangled or paralyzed by what hasn’t happened yet (and probably never will).
Projecting into the future is useful if used for good—but living there in fear is not.
The apostle Paul said: “God didn’t give us a spirit of fear; but of power…”
Jesus often told people not to fear or worry, but instead emphasized belief and faith.
In fact, many psychological and spiritual concepts also revolve around the idea that fear and anxiety are usually just a mismatch between what our soul knows to be true, and the current thoughts our mind is thinking.
In other words, despite the rare acute situation of imminent danger, our default mindset should be one of peace, empowerment, clarity, love, wisdom, and positive alignment. Those are the frequencies of God.
If you are thinking a fearful thought, that painful emotion that results is usually just an indication of the distance of your current thought from the perspective of God. Again, with the rare exception of imminent danger, the worse the emotion, the further the thought is from the perspective of God. It’s a really nice system if we are aware of it.
So the next time you find yourself in a spiral of fear or anxiety, just ask yourself if the thought you’re currently thinking is coming from a Godly perspective? If not, could you apply faith, belief, and trust to that situation, and use that powerful imagination to consider what could go right instead of being anxious about what could go wrong (or what may currently be wrong)?
In any situation there is an escape hatch for the mind, and it’s casting those concerns to God and making the conscious choice to pivot toward faith and trust in God.
Of course this is all easier said than done, but it’s what we are asked to do. Life is always asking us to control our mind and choose faith over fear. In fact, that seems to be the whole point for living. We are not meant to be passive about it. We’re not meant to be mental worriers, we’re meant to be mental warriors.
So next time you feel fear or anxiety, just ask: “what is a different thought I could have about this situation it from a perspective of faith and empowerment?” Maybe it’s to accept that you’re looking at a situation from fear instead of power, or maybe it’s asking you to be confident about choosing a better path for yourself.
If you struggle to come up with an alternative thought or action, you can try typing exactly how you feel into Grok or ChatGPT, with as much detail as possible (remembering to change names if it is not a private AI) and ask it for a Godly perspective about that thought, and it will probably give you a great alternative way to think about it and orient forward.
This is the blog of Eric Crawford, Founder of Raise Your Elevation. Eric is a former Sales VP @ Microsoft. He holds a master of theology degree from Saint Leo University, and is a graduate of the Program on Negotiations at Harvard Law School. For more about Eric’s background, see here, or for more about Raise Your Elevation, see here. For more about melding the technology and theology of the mind for better outcomes in life, follow this blog. Thanks for reading!