Why do we fear death? Why do we fear the exact chance to meet our Creator and live with Him forever? I think it’s truly because we can’t control when or how that happens. Let me explain…
For as long as I can remember, I feared death and Heaven. I was around 6 or 7 when I started freaking out and some nights I remember crying myself to sleep. I’d wake up in the morning, forget all about it and go right about my day. As I got older, I couldn’t just ignore those fears, because the more they lagged in my mind, the more they grew into monsters. Monsters that took over my brain and caused me to be physically ill. My anxiety story is for another time since it is long and complex, but just recently my mom and I worked out something aloud.
Something that had been holding my mind captive since senior year, the feeling of not being in control.
I feared I could never control whether or not she thought I was good enough or whether the guy I was with, etc. (The last part would make sense once you hear my story). Finally, I had told her out loud a pain I had been holding onto and I forgave her, after almost two years. I felt free! The anxiety and fear that had been crippling me for years felt virtually gone. I still had a few symptoms of anxiety lingering, but I knew with medical help I could get better.
2 days later, I get a message on my phone from a friend saying, “Have you seen the news? Have you heard about Tiktok?” To any normal person, they’d be like oh whatever. To me, someone who uses TikTok every day, part of their morning routine, has more than 74 thousand followers and has influenced a career from it, my heart dropped. I raced over to my news app to look at the top headline, “Trump banning TikTok starting tomorrow.” A little update, it is almost 4 days after that article was released and I just posted one last night, so no it’s not banned. But at that moment, I could feel my heart drop a little bit. I was so consumed by this app and the content it brought me, I didn’t want to lose it.
I wanted to control my contentment.
That night my mind started racing and emotions filled my mind so quickly that I couldn’t even see straight. I remember calling a friend and not even being able to truly hear what he was saying because my mind was in flight or fight mode. I read a tweet that night that caused one of the worst panic attacks in my life, it read:
“You can cancel TIKTOK, but you can’t cancel Jesus. AKA He’s coming back real soon y’all, so the government can’t control that.”
Reading that sent my mind in overdrive. The anxiety attack started, I started softly trembling. My mind would race about impending doom. I felt like there wasn’t anything I could do to stop Jesus from coming back. The next two days I barely slept, I felt like I was carrying such a weight on my shoulders that no one saw. I would ask friends and their response would be “It’s no big deal.” “It’s not like that Cassidy, it’s better.” Nobody I talked to could get on the same level I was with it, and that was fear of not being able to control my life.
Nobody I talked to could get on the same level I was with it, and that was fear of not being able to control my life.
Finally, I decided to do the only thing I could: cry to my mom about it. I started crying and getting it all out and then my legs started to shake. My chest got tight. Mentally, it felt like I was there but not really. Tears kept rolling. My stomach got sour and nauseous and I RAN to the bathroom. After throwing up multiple times, my mind would race back to the fact that Jesus could be coming soon. I could die soon. What my mind convinced me to be: Impending doom. This panic attack cycle went on for hours into the night, until finally, I fell asleep. I woke up this morning HOPING I’d just forget about last night, like when I was a kid. SIKEEE. I woke up and immediately started to tremble. Deciding that there was as literally nothing else I could do, I read an article about fearing death and everything mentioned was everything I was feeling. I mentally had to come to this conclusion after reading some about it:
We can’t control when Jesus comes back. We can’t control how. We never did.
That gives me peace. We never controlled when Jesus was coming back because He decided that such a long time ago. For me to be freaking OUT about Him coming back now… what good did that do?
I had to mentally change the “impending doom” to “impending safety” because Jesus is coming back to save us from eternal death.
It is set in stone that we truly have no control over anything. Let me say it again for the people in the back.
We have no control over anything. Except for the attitude of our hearts.
The way we feel about Jesus coming back. The way we anticipate Him coming back. The way we feel about death. The way we treat others while still here. The way we love believers and non-believers. The way we live like today is our last. The way we love God. These are things we CAN control: the attitude of our hearts. I’m gonna give y’all one more analogy and then I’m done writing.
Think about marriage. When two people are so in love, they WANT to spend eternity/forever with that person. Nothing could come between them or stop the love they have for one another. What if God wanted that same AGAPE love with us? What if He wants to spend forever with us because He just loves us that much? Well. He does. How do we know? Because of God. Is. Love.
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:7-8
I leave y’all with one truth:
We cannot control anything, but we serve a God who controls everything.
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