Fear & Pain - 2/2

Fear and Pain can be like two pillars that hold up a plethora of negative behaviour. All destructive behaviour such as addictions, anger, anti-social behaviour and more can always be traced back to one or both of these two causes.

Remove or minimise the fear, or pain, and the house of cards will come tumbling down to enable new thought patterns and healthy behaviour to flourish. While this is easier said than done, there is one simple key to the process . . .

Dealing to pride.

While we may know that the underlying cause of negative thoughts or behaviour will always contain fear and/or pain, there can also be other causes such as social, physical, medical or spiritual. If say for example a child is currently being molested, or if someone is still experiencing external physical, spiritual or other trauma, this will of course affect the diagnosis, and influence the prescription.

I have found though that in most cases where a person can be helped to recognise the source of fear or pain, that they can then very easily deal with it in their own way and own time. The thinking here is that one needs to identify the illness before being able to prescribe the medicine.

If Fear and Pain are two pillars, holding up a range of negative thoughts and behaviours, what they themselves are supported by is important. If we can remove the support for the pillars, we can undermine the whole shooting works and effectively bring the whole house of cards down without having to fight every inch of the way.

Fear and Pain rest upon PRIDE. The removal (or at least neutralling) of pride, causes fear and pain to dissipate. Just as the arrival of light on a scene causes darkness to lose its power, so too does the arrival of humility reduce the power of fear and pain.

Using this principle then in a business context, we may have for example a businessman who is frightened of failure. He may have watched his father struggle in depression times, or through wartime, and is fearful of going down a similar path. This fear could easily be a mixture of fear of failure, and maybe a little pain from watching his father suffer. Should he introduce humility into the situation, where he doesn’t feel a need to be perfect, nor to meet his own unreasonably high expectations (or of his father’s, friend’s or others), he can then accept that business failure is always a possibility, even for the best of us, and then be free from fear. Deliberately giving him self the space to fail (by choosing humility) actually removes his fear of failure and usually causes him to outwork his business life more effectively and profitably.

This is more than just positive thinking. It is actually removing the cause of negativity - pride.

Now the trouble with pride is that by its very nature pride usually prevents us from seeing our own pride, so many times we can’t permit us to deal with our own pride.

Calling on an external source breaks the gridlock, forces pride into submission, and enables the healing to occur. Simple - yes. Easy - not too start with but easier to do the more we do it.

Pride works in us all, just like rust never sleeps, and like gravity constantly works to pull us to the earth. It’s always there and we’ll always be fighting it till the day we die.

One of the great saints of the New Testament wrote of his own struggles to deal with the “old nature”. He really wanted to do the right thing but found himself dragged down all the time.

This is how Paul put it in the letter he wrote to his Roman converts:

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Romans 7:21-25a

This is not just a one-off sad case study with no hope - it the reality for us all. But the key here is not that Paul struggles with this “pride” thing, it is that he has found someone to help break the Catch 22 for him - the Lord Jesus. Fessing up to his pride, kills the opportunity for fear and pain to take over in Paul’s life, and helped him get on with living one of the fullest lives recorded of any Christian in the last 2,000 years!

It’s the VICTUS IN AMBITUS way to fess-up and call for help from the same source as Paul, then get on with living a full life.