Fear Has Torment, and She Has Had Enough

She still believes. That is what nobody who knows her situation ever quite gets.

Fourteen years since she was last in a service and she prays most days and she has a Bible with a cracked spine on the shelf beside the cookery books. She is not angry with God, and she is not angry with the people either, exactly, which is a thing she has had to explain to two counselors.

What she cannot do is go into a building.

The last one she was in was a Sunday evening when she was twenty three and a visiting speaker did a thing with the lights. He asked everybody to imagine coming home to an empty house. Then he described it, at length, with details, and she remembers the detail about the front door being open and she remembers the exact temperature of her own hands.

Then he made an appeal, and she went forward, for about the fifth time in her life, and prayed the same prayer, and it did not help.

She left three months later, quietly, and nobody rang.

Here is the thing she cannot get past, and it is not the speaker. It is that for six years before that, that was what she thought the message was. Not a rumor of it. The whole of it. That the point of the Christian faith was to not be caught out, and that the way you achieved this was by maintaining a state of readiness she could never verify.

She got out with her faith, which she considers a piece of luck, and she has never got back in.

Sit down. There is a verse that names what that room was doing, and it is not on the speaker's side.

Fear is named as the problem, not the method

Here is the sentence, and notice that it treats fear as something to be got rid of rather than as an instrument.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.1 John 4:18

Read the direction of travel. Love casts fear out. Fear is the thing being evicted, and love is doing the evicting, and there is no sentence anywhere in that chapter suggesting the fear was a useful stage on the way.

And the diagnosis in the middle is exact: fear has to do with punishment. That is what was in the room that evening. Not the love of God being described. A punishment being anticipated, in detail, with the lights doing something.

You were not being taught the message that night. What is written puts fear and love in opposition and says one drives out the other, and the Spirit inspired that as a description of what maturity looks like rather than as a technique for filling an aisle.

What the six years actually installed

Now the deeper thing, which is not about one evening.

Six years of understanding the faith as not being caught out will build a very particular structure in a person. It makes God primarily somebody to avoid a bad outcome from. It makes assurance a matter of self monitoring. And it makes every ordinary lapse of attention feel like an exposure.

That structure is exhausting to live inside and it is not what the New Testament describes, and the tell is that it has no floor. There is no amount of readiness that produces rest, because the readiness is being generated by the person and the person keeps getting tired.

You were carrying a load that was never issued to you. Nothing written anywhere makes vigilance the ground of a person's standing, and the Spirit is described in that same letter as the evidence that God abides in us rather than as a supervisor checking whether we do.

And the fact that you left is not the sin in this story. A body will eventually walk out of a room that is hurting it, and yours did at twenty three, and it took your faith with it, which is remarkable rather than shameful.

What the buildings and the fear have to do with each other

Here is the practical part, and this page is not going to tell you to go back next Sunday.

The thing you cannot do is enter a building. That is a specific and physical response and it deserves to be treated as what it is rather than as a spiritual failure. It is not disobedience. It is a body remembering.

What can change first is not the building. It is the material. Fourteen years of praying on your own, with the only theology available being the one installed by the age of twenty three, means the structure has never been replaced, only avoided.

You have a right to be taught something different. 1 John 4:18 is where it stands written, the Spirit is the one who makes it more than a nicer opinion, and a person can be re-taught by reading, by a voice, by one honest friend, long before any door needs to be opened.

And the buildings can wait. If it happens, it will probably happen sideways: a funeral, a carol service, somebody's baptism, twenty minutes at the back with a coat on. That is a perfectly respectable way in and nothing anywhere requires anything more dramatic.

And it is worth saying plainly that the thing you actually left was not the faith. You walked out of a particular teaching about the faith, carried out by particular people, in a particular building, and you took the faith with you when you went. Fourteen years of praying most days in a kitchen is not the behavior of somebody who left God. It is the behavior of somebody who got out of a burning room holding the one thing worth carrying, and the Spirit has been with you in that kitchen the whole time, which is what 1 John says He does.