Stream of Thought

Over the span of five days, here in New Hampshire, we had wind, rain, sleet, daffodils blooming, heavy snow with thunder and lightning, faint tremors from a New Jersey earthquake, and then, to top it all off…

I turned fifty.

Oh, right, and there was also that whole total eclipse of the sun thing.

Fifty! Me! Fifty years old! How did that happen?!

One breath at a time.

For someone whom doctors did not expect to live to the age of thirteen, someone who seriously treated every year between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five as if each one would be her last, reaching the quarter of a century mark (gulp) is amazing. So, praise God. Thanks be to God for my loving and generous parents, the good parts of modern medicine, and the gift of a true love for life. I’m especially thankful this year, anyway, because answered prayers saw both my mother and my father through surgeries, my dad is actually in recovery as I’m writing this. (An update on this will appear at the end of this post or in the comments.)

God is good. And yes, I know that when I say that, I must also be able to say it when my prayers get a different answer than what I hoped for — God is good. (Please Lord, do not let me be put to the test!)

God is good.

All the time.

God is good.

We are all getting older. Yes, even you, dear reader. I’m thinking today that every birthday should not only be a celebration of our lives so far, but also a celebration of what is yet to be.

Too often, way too often, I have fear when I think about the future. What will my care look like as my parents continue to age, how long will they continue to age, what will our final days on Earth look like, feel like…? These fearful questions plague me, even though I know that fear is not the answer to anything. Fear is not how I should go forward with each day. My Pastor, on Divine Mercy Sunday, said that fear and death are blinding forces. They prevent us from seeing the truth. The truth is that we are all children of God, that He is always with us, loving us, and that God will never let our lives come to a complete end. Heaven is real. The resurrection of Jesus is proof of God’s power over everything fearful in our human lives. The mercy of Jesus is proof of God’s power over everything fearful in our human lives.

There’s a line from Scripture that my friend, Thérèse Williams, once quoted to me: “Perfect love casts out fear.”[i]

And when she said it, I thought to myself, “Then, I’m probably always going to be fearful, because my love for God is far from perfect.”

My dear reader, my love for God is not perfect. It is terribly far from perfect. The ghosts from my past life of doubt often haunt me, and I am unwilling to surrender as I should to God’s will or even the will of my own parents. I was dejected by the Scripture quote my friend shared with me, even though she, a woman of great faith, saw it as great encouragement.

Then I started having more thoughts about this. Maybe the reason that my love for God isn’t perfect (the reason your love for God maybe isn’t perfect) is that we are humans and not God. Therefore, nothing that we do or have is perfect. Only God is perfect. Maybe only God’s love is perfect… and then the prayerful thoughts continued… God is love, so maybe God is the “perfect love” that drives out fear.

Maybe the answer to looking toward the future without fear isn’t to somehow muster up perfect love for God but, rather, to allow God to love me perfectly. To allow God to love me to fulfillment. It’s God who drives out fear. Not me. So I need to remember, yet again, to let God love me. (My little “ahas” often sound so familiar, see my post from 2016.)

In a couple of weeks, more about letting God love me and another little “aha.”

© 2024 Christina Chase

Update: my dad is home from surgery, looking good and resting nicely. 🙂

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Feature Photo by Jongsun Lee on Unsplash

[i] 1 John 4:18