The Fear That Came With the Love

The same words go at the top of every page on this site, and I put them first on purpose. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write ever stands in for a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If somebody in that house is unwell, ring somebody qualified today, before you read another line about what got handed on.

Now. You were taught to be kind by somebody who was frightened.

And the two things were not separated, because she could not separate them either. She taught you to watch people carefully, which is kindness. She also taught you to watch them for signs that something was wrong, which is fear. And those were the same lesson, delivered in the same voice, in the same kitchen.

So now you are an attentive person, which is a genuinely lovely thing, and you are also a person who cannot walk into a room without scanning it, and you have never been able to separate those two because they arrived fused.

And you have half suspected for years that if you gave up the scanning you would also lose the attentiveness, and then you would be one of those people who does not notice anything.

One of them was given and one of them was not

There is a verse in the second letter to Timothy that does the separating for you, and it does it in one line.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7, King James Version)

Read the list carefully, because it is two lists.

There is a thing that was not given, and it is named first: the spirit of fear. And then there is what was given: power, love, and a sound mind.

The love is on the given list. The fear is on the not given list. They are not in the same category and they never were, however they arrived in your kitchen.

You are holding one thing that was given and one that was not. Second Timothy 1:7 puts the fear and the love on opposite sides of the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody separate two things that were taught together.

And I want you to notice what is sitting between them on the given list: a sound mind. A mind that is not being run by the scanning. That is on the given side, which means it is available.

You have been offered a sound mind and it has never once been out of reach. The Spirit of God is the one who is named in that very verse as the giver, and it is written that fear is explicitly not part of what came, which settles where the scanning came from.

Losing the fear does not cost you the kindness

Let me say the practical half, because the fear underneath all of this is that the trade is not possible.

The attentiveness and the anxiety feel like one faculty because they use the same equipment. Both of them involve noticing. Both of them run through the same part of you that was trained in a kitchen thirty years ago.

But noticing is not the same as fearing, and the proof of that is in people who notice everything and are not frightened. They exist. You probably know one and have envied them without understanding what the difference was.

You are able to keep the noticing and set down the dread. Second Timothy 1:7 lists love and a sound mind together as given, which puts warm attention and clear thinking on the same side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the fear out of a faculty without taking the faculty.

And there is something to say about the woman who taught you. She was not doing it on purpose. She had learned it herself from somebody who had needed it, and she gave you the whole package because nobody had ever unpacked it for her either.

You were handed something unexamined by somebody who was handed it unexamined, and no one in that line has ever once been to blame for it. The Spirit of God is the one who ends a chain without condemning anybody in it, and what is written names the fear as not from God rather than as somebody's fault.

The plain routing, and scanning is not it

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on this subject it needs saying carefully.

If somebody in that house is in trouble right now, that is 911, and scanning a room is not the answer to it. If the heavy thing today is in your own mind, and particularly if the watching has grown into something that takes up most of your hours, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And if anybody in that house is unwell, ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today.

You are permitted to hand the watching over to somebody trained. Second Timothy 1:7 puts a sound mind on the given list rather than treating vigilance as a virtue, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody stop being the household's alarm system.

That is the thing I would actually like for you. Not that you notice less. That the noticing stops being the only line of defense in that house, because it was never supposed to be.

You have never once been the only thing standing between your family and harm. The Spirit of God is the one who relieves somebody of a post nobody assigned them, and what is written names power and love and a sound mind as the equipment, with fear specifically excluded.