How do we conquer fear?

An interesting question, and one that I’ve pondered myself. Growing up, I was taught a temporary solution to this issue. Ignore hardships and troubles, continue pushing them off, and hopefully they’ll just disappear. As you’d expect, that isn’t very sustainable.

Imagine if you will, a tiny snowball rolling down a hill. Now at first, that snowball isn’t of any threat, you’ll barely notice it. As a matter of fact, if you’d go out of your way to stop the snowball right now, while it would be incredibly irksome, you could get it done, with little to no effort. The danger lies in ignoring it, hoping the snowball loses momentum, or spirals out of control. Both scenarios are plausible, but not a practical way to deal with our hypothetical snowball situation. It’s more likely to keep advancing toward you, gaining more momentum and size, until it becomes ultimately too much for you to handle…At least without some kind of assistance or interference. Avoiding something out of fear, could have catastrophic consequences in the long run.

So you can’t put it off. You can’t ignore it. How do you handle fear? What’s the answer to conquering it? The answer is rather simple. Face it. Like the example I provided before. You’ve only got two options, when dealing with fear. Run from it, until it eventually overtakes you…Or face it now. I remember watching a motivational speaker. He said something that made me reevaluate how I saw life. Les Brown said, “The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it’s here that you’ll find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step.”

I’m Christian, and I believe God made each and everyone of us unique. There’s about 7.8 billion people on this planet, yeah, that’s a lot. The crazy part about that number though, is that there’s only one of you. I mean really sit on that for a moment. The odds of someone else that looks like you, that acts like you, that does all the things that make you, well…you, are practically impossible. Don’t let fear rob the world, of what you can offer it.