Clairmont - More Than Know - You Are More Than You Know: Face Your Fears, Grow Stronger

YOU ARE
More
THAN YOU
KNOW

FACE YOUR FEARS, FIND YOUR STRENGTHS

PATSY
CLAIRMONT

Copyright 2015 by Patsy Clairmont

Published by Worthy Books, an imprint of Worthy Publishing Group, a division of Worthy Media, Inc., 134 Franklin Road, Suite 200, Brentwood, Tennessee 37027.

WORTHY is a registered trademark of Worthy Media, Inc.

Helping people experience the heart of God

eBook available wherever digital books are sold.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957121

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, NIV Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Patsy Clairmont is represented by Mike Atkins Entertainment, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-61795-325-5 (trade paper)

Cover Design: Studio Gearbox

Cover Image: onimages/Veer

Interior Design and Typesetting: Christopher D. Hudson & Associates, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

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Tell me, what is it you plan
to do with your one wild
and precious life?

Mary Oliver

Fight your fears and youll
be in a battle forever. Face
your fears and youll be free
forever.

Lucas Jonkman

She is such a happy soul.

Hes so dear.

They sound like tidy descriptive packages but then, truth be known, Ms. Happy Soul turns out to be an uptight tyrant at home and Mr. Dear turns out to have scary secrets including a second family tucked away in another town. No one can be easily described nor can we be counted on to always be just one way. We are far too complicated to fit into a pithy phrase.

Have you ever tried to draw a picture of your emotional life? Instead of using a straight-edge ruler to help illustrate who we are inside, we probably would be more accurately represented by a map, perhaps the one that shows Pauls shipwrecks, beatings, and prison visits or the journey of the Israelites on their way to the Promised Land. What looked like it should have been a short jaunt over to the land of milk and honey ended up being a forty-year escapade of ups and downsenemies, celebrations, battles, and fears. This truly is a more accurate visual of the twists and turns within us as well as the road ahead of us.

Little has changed since that Exodus walk. We are still going through emotional ups and downs. We are still in a mind war with an adversary whod like to take us out. We continue to have seasons of joy, though never long enough from our vantage point. And we are still dueling with fear.

The National Institute of Mental Health claims that there are 6.3 million people who have been diagnosed with a phobia. And thats just the ones who have sought help. They also tell us that 60 percent of things we fear never happen. Golly, that seems like a waste of our energy, doesnt it? Fear takes effort to sustain and leaves us depleted. I should know. I was an agoraphobic and found myself housebound and at times bedbound with exhaustion from maintaining a fear-based life. My exaggerated emotions backed me into a suffocating place and under the influence of fear. My passion for life had turned to apathy, which led to an emotional and mental paralyzation. I couldnt seem to see past my fear.

In the childrens movie Monsters, Inc., monsters like Sulley and Mike counted on fear to power their city, Monstropolis. So they would sneak into childrens bedrooms to scare them into a scream by creeping out of closets, crawling under their beds, and peeking through windows. The vibrations of the screams were then captured and turned into electrical energy to power their city. But much to the monsters amazement, they discovered that a childs love and laughter offered them even more of what they needed. It was a greater force than fear. And they realized that their own fear of children was unfounded. So the monsters began sneaking into the kids rooms and doing silly things to get children to laugh.

I like that concept because its truelove and laughter are a powerful force. And a good belly laugh massages our inward parts, which causes our blood pressure to balance, our circulation to improve, our attitudes to adjust, and our angry defenses to come down. It clears the cobwebs from our brains, as well as myriad other health benefits. More times than I can count in our fifty-plus years of marriage, my ire has dissolved into a puddle of giggles because of my husbands ability to make me laugh. What a gift!

But life is not always fun or laugh-worthy or easily solved, like when we were kids and our parents would chase our fears away by their very presence. Today our grown-up fears tend to loom like Goliath and stick with us like a bad cold.

Unfortunately our true monster enemy, Satan, is not impressed with our capacity for laughter because fear is one of his strongest weapons against us. He knows it squelches our humor, intimidates us, and weights our heart. I have found laughter to be one of our stronger defense weapons against angst since a burst of guffaws relaxes muscles and releases life-giving endorphins. So we have this push-pull between us and the one who wants to dull our existence and annihilate our faith if not our life.

The first time we hear fear speak in the Bible is through Adam in the Garden of Eden after he and his wife gave into the seductive temptation and sin of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:16-17). God called to Adam, Where are you? Adam responded, I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid... and I hid myself (Genesis 3:9-10). Never before had fear been a part of their relationship equation. Our all-knowing God knew where they were and what they had done, but he asked Adam to put him into a place of ownership of his choice. God continues to do that throughout Scripture with his people, for in ownership and repentance comes liberty and dignity.

The day came in my life when I had to answer the same question as Adam: Patsy, where are you? And my response reverberated with familiarity: I was afraid and I hid.

Coming out of my hiding places and facing my fears has taken years, and on some days I continue to scramble up mountains with scraped knees and slide down into valleys with a thump. Im on my way to the Promised Land, but its obvious Im not there yet. There are still days I need a hand-up from another journeyer. And there are still days I want to hide, since every season of life brings its set of threats, yet because of Gods mercy and grace, I press on.