Befriending Your Monstersنموونە

Fake Monsters, Real Fears

Let’s go back to that moment from your childhood when you thought you heard a monster in your room. I’m sure you can remember one of those moments.

Ten minutes before, you had put on your favorite pajamas and lay down in your darkened room. Now, your eyelids are heavy and the trailers for your dreams have begun playing when a sound from your closet startles you.

Your eyelids fly open. Your heart rate surpasses the boiling point.

It sounded like a claw scratching the inside of the closet door, but you aren’t sure.

You wait.

And wait.

It seems like forever.

But in actuality it’s been only thirty seconds.

Two options lay before you: hide or confront.

As we age, the options don’t change. Adults replace burrowing under blankets with more refined hiding tactics like occupational obsessions, striving for social standing, vicarious living through children, or the numbness brought on by preferred vices such as wine, chocolate, or social media. They aren’t as warm and cuddly as your beloved blanket, but they are just as ineffective.

If we never face our fears, we will always be haunted by them.

If we don’t confront our shame, shame will always dictate our identity.

If we never befriend our monster, we will always be enslaved by our monster.

Only one good option exists when it comes to fear: you must go where you don’t want to go, so you can become who you were created to be. Monsters force you into the places you don’t want to go because you can’t find the salvation you need unless you embrace the darkness you fear.

When shame, weakness, insecurity, vulnerability, or doubt appear, we don’t find freedom by hiding from them. We find salvation by befriending them.

In the beginning, humanity was created full of divine goodness, and the Creator’s intention for you today is to live out of that goodness. To live fully out of love, courage, wholehearted-ness, and gratitude and not out of fear, discouragement, isolation, or entitlement. But this way of life doesn’t come without intentionality. To receive the grace of your Creator’s intention for you, I invite you to take what feels like a counterintuitive journey, because for you to become who you were created to be, you usually have to go where you never wanted to be.

How do you respond to fear? What do your monsters help you to hide from?