Conversatio Divina

Part 9 of 17

My Fearless Year

Sarah Bessey
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Table of Contents

  1. 01.  A Word Lived
  2. 02.  Love Over Fear
  3. 03.  Attentive to Love
  4. 04.  Expectations and Gifts

I took my tinies for a walk in the fading of the day’s grace. We’ve been overworked and tired lately, still recovering from that flu going around. I had spent the day doing laundry, cleaning our home, bathing tinies, and clipping fingernails in the post-Christmas recovery. We were finding ordinary time again, and I was tired and a little dull. That night, my husband was working late, so I wrestled our three little ones into their winter gear and set out.  

A walk in the gathering light is always a cure for what ails us. We walked up the slippery hill to the field across the road. We trailed down the path, and then there we were in the wide open spaces at last, breathing out a breath we didn’t know we had been holding all day. I seem to feel the brilliant weight of motherhood a bit more in the late-day hours. 

I saw a rabbit, a small gray one with a snow-white tail, leaping away from us, and I wanted to whip out my phone to take a picture, but instead I held on tight to little mittens. 

We walked across the field, ankle deep in last summer’s remaining clover, now with ice clinging to it, and the sun rested low. 

I unbuckled our youngest from the stroller prison and set her free to wander. She promptly clawed into the cold patches of dirt, pulling out small stones to present as jeweled offerings. She piled up dead leaves in the stroller’s undercarriage. 

She hollered with delight, chased after her older siblings with her nose running, and the light magnetized around her. I crouched on my haunches, just to see their childish faces a bit better. 

When the sun fell below the horizon, the light blazed out behind the pine trees. This is it, I thought as I stood up, back straight, because this is my favorite sight: the inky blackness of pine trees, black lace relief burned out against the burnt orange and salmon pink of western sky as the last guardian of this day cedes. It never lasts long, but it comes every day; it’s worth watching. I stood, in the bright cold faraway silence, and the fading light fell on me, tired and glorious and spent. I felt wildly, inexplicably happy. I could see my breath. 

What a year. 

I filled my fleece pockets with their rocks and shriveled rose hips. “Yes, yes, I see you,” I said over and over as they danced and wandered and called for my attention, “I’m already watching.” 

01.  A Word Lived

The One Word 365 community (www.oneword365.com) has a different approach to New Year’s resolutions. Instead of a long list of commitments to lose weight or read the Bible every day, we each decide to choose a one-word theme for the coming year. I have participated in the community’s practice for a few years, and I have always found this to be a meaningful and transformative experience in some way. 

But in the closing days of 2011, the year before, I didn’t so much as choose my word for 2012 as feel my word rising up in my ribs and shouting out loud in my heart chambers with prophetic urgency. It was weird, but undeniable. 

And that word was fearless. 

For a few years, I had worked, prayed, cried, scrabbled, confessed, worshiped, and repented my way out of being a people-pleasing approval addict, all glory to the Ancient of Days. Almost every regret or sin or wrong in my life can be traced back to a root of fear. 

So when I felt so inexplicably drawn towards the word fearless for the year ahead, it wasn’t exactly unprecedented or unexpected. The soil was ready. I decided that this word meant that I was to say yes to all God asked of me. I was to spend a year committed to loving fearlessly, to lavishing grace without expectation. I decided to speak the truth, even if my voice was shaking. I wanted to mother my three tinies out of my best hopes, instead of my worst fears. I wanted to confront evil, to speak out for and with my sisters around the world who are silenced. I wanted to work and rabble-rouse and proclaim the gospel fearlessly. So I envisioned a year of doing hard, good things. As a writer, I also wanted to send redemptive art out into the world, even if the critics were waiting, even if I was wrong. I decided it would be a year to try anyway. 

02.  Love Over Fear

In his later years, John the Beloved wrote to the Church that perfect love casts out fear, because there is no fear in love. 

I was about to learn for myself: this is the path of fearlessness. It’s not jumping out planes or traveling, not risk-taking or conquering mountains. 

And twelve months passed. 

As the year unfolded, I began to realize that my little nudge to choose fearless was more of a gigantic shove off a cliff by the Holy Spirit, a sort of dinner bell clanging, “Come and get it!” for almost every fear and insecurity I’ve petted, hidden, and indulged in my life. 

Choosing love over fear, over and over, with the hope that it would take deep hold in my life, became a spiritual discipline. 

With this understanding, I began to realize that most of my fears were rooted in my identity. Some were silly and inconsequential, hardly worth noting (but I’ll admit, it was still satisfying to confront them). Others were rooted in my theology or my inadequacies or past experiences, and these fears didn’t fall easily; they would need to be cast out by Love alone. 

Brennan Manning writes in The Ragamuffin Gospel, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”Manning, Brennan, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-up and Burnt-Out (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2005), 27. That kind of awareness is transformative. 

03.  Attentive to Love

The radical act of living loved, the fearlessness of resting in our own belovedness in Christ, was and is the only way to root out fear and truly live free. So that was the year I decided to run my first 5K in support of Mercy Ministries of Canada, a Christian nonprofit, free-of-charge residential home for young women with life-controlling issues. At the end of the race, I promptly threw up and collapsed, as if it were a marathon, but hey, I did it! 

That was the year I signed with a literary agent. Even if the world doesn’t need another book, I needed to write one. So I researched and wrote a book proposal, and then I survived my fair share of rejections, a few very pointed ones, I might add, before signing a book deal with a publisher. And then I wrote a book about Christian feminism, the heart of God, and the kingdom ways of Jesus. That was also the year I decided to stop being afraid of public speaking, and I accepted my first speaking invitations. 

That was the year I had a personal encounter with third-world poverty. I went to Haiti with Help One Now, a group of people dedicated to using their gifts, talents, and resources to help end extreme poverty, care for orphans, rescue slaves, and see communities transformed by serving local leaders on the ground. I got to know Haiti and made a few friends. I learned how much I didn’t know about community development and how helping can hurt. I learned to stop talking about “the poor” and start seeing and serving and listening to real people. I decided to stop making excuses for not engaging personally with poverty relief and orphan care. And with a group of friends and my online community, we raised the money to finance the building of a school there in cooperation with local Haitians. 

That was the year I took the risk of community again, particularly with intentional church. It meant time and energy, absolutely, but the greater fear to be conquered was the fear of being hurt. I walked out the fearlessness of showing up for people, and letting other people into my own heart and home. 

That was the year I truly leaned into my identity in Christ. I rested and I prayed. I lived like I was beloved, I prayed like someone was listening, I cried and I got angry and I questioned. I spent a lot of my time in Scripture and in silence. I had intended to spend the year doing a lot of stuff that scared me, but in the end, surprisingly, instead I began to believe, really believe, the truth of the psalmist: “I sought the Lord and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears” (Psalm 34:4, NASBScripture quotations marked (NASB) are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.lockman.org)). 

And so that was also the year I learned that the most fearless thing I can do is to keep showing up, in my own real, right-now life, as a disciple of Jesus. That was the year I found hope, like a seed in my life, and I decided to fearlessly guard that small sprout. 

Jesus calls us to faithful in the secret, long before— and often in lieu of—being radical on a stage. So I began to learn how to be fearless in my marriage and in my mothering, with my family and with my friends; someday, I hope I’ll come to love the whole world. 

Fearlessness rarely has much to do with adrenalin. In fact, it often looks like a quiet determination to simply live fully into the daily work of loving others well. And that was the year of a thousand sacred and mundane moments made beautiful. 

As I said, what a year! 

04.  Expectations and Gifts

The sun had disappeared and the sky was turning navy, so I put the baby back into her stroller. She proceeded to holler the entire way back up the hill. Once she had tasted freedom, she could not go back to her tame little stroller. She fought the restraints, and I wondered whether she would be so indignant if she hadn’t been so happy being free. 

I used to think that conquering my fears would be a lot sexier than it really was. I thought I would be rewarded for my efforts by a good experience. I thought that if I said yes to writing my book that the words would flow easily and offers would pour in. I thought that if I got up my courage to try intentional community again, that I would be met with kindred spirits and casseroles and a welcoming committee instead of the slow burn of building relationships. I thought that if I said yes to Haiti, that I would not be as wrecked and powerless and wondering as I feel right now. I thought that if I say yes to public speaking for a good reason that I would not lose it—and then cry the entire way through my carefully prepared speech (which has happened). But it didn’t always work that way. Sometimes the first step was just as awful as I had imagined. But I did it anyway, learning to trust God in the space between the leap and the landing. 

I don’t think I’m fearless now, not by a long shot. But at the end of that year, I was becoming more convinced of my belovedness in Christ, regardless of what I did or didn’t do, and really, that’s pretty much the same thing.  

My son held on to my left hand while my eldest daughter clung to my right, the baby finally content to ride along. I began to sing old songs in the young night of an old year as we walked; now I was thinking of what to make for supper. My voice was thin and the stars were coming out. I was carrying us all home. 

Footnotes

Sarah Bessey is a writer and an award-winning blogger. Her first book, Jesus Feminist (Howard Books), comes out in November 2013. Sarah is an editor at A Deeper Story, and a contributor at SheLoves Magazine. She is a happy, clappy, Jesus lover; a joyful subversive; a voracious reader; an unrepentant hashtag abuser; and a social justice wannabe. She lives in Abbotsford, British Columbia, with her husband and their three tinies. You can find her online at www.sarahbessey.com.

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