“Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God” Isaiah 41:10 NIV.
Success coach Rich Litvin says, “Most people think that success means no longer having to feel fear. The truth is, successful people head in the direction of their fear.”
I had a bad case of aerophobia for about seven years, that is, the fear of flying. I’d never had any phobias. I don’t like snakes, but the fear of them has never given me night sweats and heart palpitations. But aerophobia has given them to me more times than I can count. I flew every week for years. Nothing helped, even medication or alcohol. Okay, the alcohol helped a little, but caused its own problems, so I stopped using it to dull my anxieties.
I eventually figured out that I wasn’t afraid of flying. I was afraid of crashing. The statistics didn’t reassure me, either. I understood I had a much greater chance of dying backing out of my driveway than from a plane crash, but it didn’t help. There was something much deeper going on in my subconscious mind that troubled me. I eventually figured out that I had somehow lost my belief that God would hold the airplane up.
Flying (and crashing, really) became an icon, a symbol, of my faith in God. I was trapped in a deep crisis of faith. Every flight was a test, a microcosmic event that represented the arc of my entire life, specifically in the fear that God would let me down or life wouldn’t end well for me. I only recovered from it when I released as much of my will as I could to His will. I had to come to terms with the fact that it’s not God’s job to keep the plane up. It’s the pilots job.