Fear 01: The Introduction Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura: Hey guys, Laura Wifler here with Risen Motherhood. We are so excited to be back in your earbuds after many months away, doing our Best Of season. Guys, we have all new content for you, and so we will get to the show in just a minute, where of course, Emily is going to be joining me. Before we get there, I want to tell you guys about a few new things. I'm sure you guys all heard our new music and our jingle. Kind of a fun, fresh update, but that is not all that is new. One big thing I want to draw your guys' attention to, is the free downloads that we have that go along with this mini-series on the topic of fear. When you sign up for our newsletter, you are going to receive a free download and in that download is a five-day devotional written by Emily. Guys, it’s so good. I highly encourage you to go check it out and to spend some time just with the Lord and reading that devotional.
In addition, we have a really neat tool that you can use with your kids when talking with them about fear. It's a craft. I'm not a Pinterest mom. Crafts are not my thing, and I promise you it is achievable. No matter your craft style or your level, you can do this craft with your kiddos. It has become a great tool for us to use in our own home. I’m thrilled for all of you guys to get it and to be able to talk with your children about their fears and pointing them to Christ in the midst of it.
Our newsletter also got this fresh new look. It’s really beautiful. It's really fun, if I do say so myself. I hope you'll check it out because we really want to bless you guys with great content through the newsletter, so head over to risenmotherhood.com/fear. There, you're going to find all the information about this miniseries, everything that you might need, and that's where you can sign up to get your free downloads because we want to make sure you guys get those in your inbox so that you can be able to use them.
Of course, as with all of our past Risen Motherhood episodes, we have discussion questions so you can continue the conversation in your own home, so check those out in our show notes. We've also got transcripts and we've got all sorts of resources. Again, after you listen to our show, head over to risenmotherhood.com/fear. You're going to find a great landing page with all the links to all the stuff that I just mentioned. Let's stop talking about that. Let's get to the show.
Welcome back to Risen Motherhood, to an all-new season and series and all the things. We’re so excited to be back in your earbuds.
Emily: Yes, this is our first episode of 2021 and really our first brand spanking new episode in a long time.
Laura: Yes, it feels so good to be back in our chairs, sitting down, talking to one another. You guys, we’re so excited to get going on this new miniseries that we're doing through the year.
Emily: Yes. As Laura mentioned, or you may have caught this on our last episode of 2020, we’re going to be moving away from this format of different topics every single episode over the course of the whole year and moving into this mini-series format. We're going to be taking one topic and digging deeper, and trying to look at it from all its different angles and facets. Of course, we're not going to be totally comprehensive, let's be real, but we're going to try to have more than just one conversation while still sticking to that 20, 30-minute time range that we know works so well for many of you.
Laura: Yes, and our hope is that we can bring you into these conversations, like Emily said, they're going to be a launching point. They're not necessarily going to cover all the facets, but we're going to tie them into motherhood and what we're learning as best we can. We want you guys to know that our mission has not changed. We are still here to encourage, equip, and challenge moms to apply the gospel to everyday lives. Our hope is that by moving to these mini-series type things, we can actually get you thinking a little bit deeper and bring you along in the process, as Emily and I are learning, that we can share out of the overflow of what we're learning right now.
Emily: We just want to set your expectations, these are regular conversations.
Laura: Convos. These are not preparatory, seminary, theological, all the things.
Emily: [chuckles] Yes, because as Karen Hodge says, we're gospel friends to you guys. That's what Laura and I are to each other. That's what we hope to be to our community. Again, this isn't that we're sitting in some authoritative position in your life. We're not trying to be your pastor, your husband, or really anybody who's giving you super-specific advice or telling you what to do. Our aim is just to be friends who can lock arms with you, come alongside you and just have the same type of conversations that you're having with your gospel friends in real life, and then bring you along as we all try to pursue Christ together.
Laura: As you listen, just remember, that we are two regular moms processing what we're facing, what we're learning in light of the gospel, trying to grow and to change in light of God's word and what He is asking of us, but you can do things differently than us. You don't have to think about things the exact same way as us. We encourage you to go to your Bibles, like Emily said, go to your gospel friends, talk with them to continue to just learn and grow, and form your own thoughts on all of these topics.
Our first mini-series, what we're starting on today, hopefully you caught the trailer on social media. If you are following us on social media @RisenMotherhood, we did drop a little teaser trailer so you could get an idea of what we're talking about today, and we're going to talk about fear.
Emily: If we weren't familiar with this before, we all became very familiar with it in 2020 because it was a crazy year. I think for a lot of us, in different ways, it felt like our world changed. We trust that God is good, and we're going to look back maybe someday and see the incredible ways that He was working in our hearts and in our lives, but sometimes when we're in the midst of it, it still seems so crazy and chaotic, and it's hard to make sense of everything.
Laura: Before we get too far, we do want to just say that fear is all-encompassing, right? It's mental, it's spiritual, it's physical, and there are a lot of aspects. Before we dive in too deep into this topic, we would recommend that you might want to find the wisdom or the knowledge of a pastor, a doctor, a Bible, or a licensed counselor, someone who has really studied this topic more in depth. Again, as we said earlier, we are just two moms who are talking about this in our own lives, but there are definitely times where it is really, really important for you to bring in a professional. Please, listen to everything that we say with that caveat in your ears, so that you're not taking something that we're saying too far and just ending up in a place that you don't need to end up being in.
Emily: Yes, that's a good word.
Laura: With that being said, Emily was getting into how crazy 2020 has been. When the pandemic happened and our first lockdowns happened, I think a lot of people probably experienced their grocery stores being entirely shut down or running out of food. I'll never forget the moment that I was walking through Target, I had a mask on, I didn't have any children with me. I was all by myself, which was obviously pretty rare as a mom, and they were just saying over the loudspeakers, they were talking all about, "Please stay 6 feet apart from one another. Please only take two non-perishable items," I don’t remember it all exactly—but it was like a movie.
It was so eerie and bizarre. There were empty shelves, and there were signs everywhere, and caution, and wash your hands, and all these things. I teared up in the middle of that aisle and I just thought, "Oh, my goodness, my life has changed forever."
Emily: Yes, there were so many things I was afraid of for the first time as a mom. I remember doing a similar thing and stocking up on food because it was one of the first times in our lives that I thought, "What if I can't get food? What if I can't get a thing that I need for our children? What if I can't get diapers? What if I can't get wipes?" All of those what-ifs went through my mind. I remember doing things, nothing too wild, but that I never thought I would do in terms of stocking up out of a fear and a concern that I wasn't going to have everything I needed for my kids.
Laura: Yes. I've always been kind of the person, I don't know, Emily, about you, but I will often think, "Oh, somebody wiser than me will take care of that." "Oh, somebody more passionate than me will take care of that." "Oh, somebody, who has more of a background and a degree or all the chops needed will take care of that." I think for the first time in my life, I just thought, "Oh my goodness, it's on me to figure this out, what I need to do for my family to take care of them well."
Emily: Yes, I have had the same feeling about gaining skills and things that—okay, I've joked on the show about becoming better at homesteading but I am getting really serious about things that need to be done around our house to take care of our family. I can't just rely on the conveniences our society has always had to be there. I need to be shrewd, and prepare, and be industrious. If there are skills that I need or that our family needs to live well, and we're going to get into Proverbs 31 later, but to be a little bit more Proverbs 31 about things. I find myself taking that more seriously than ever and taking that to heart.
Laura: I think that it was the derecho that we experienced this year. If you guys aren't familiar with the derecho, do not worry, we were not either.
Emily: We also had that happen this year.
Laura: Yes, here in Iowa, we live in central Iowa in the USA. It's a land hurricane. If you look at a map and see where Iowa is, you probably don't know where Iowa is, so go do yourself a geography lesson and look where Iowa is. I promise you'll find it eventually in the middle of the country, but we're landlocked. There is no water around us. We had a land hurricane, my friends. That was another time I went to the store and all the power was out in our small town.
Emily: Yes, I couldn't get fuel. I was on less than a quarter tank of gas, and there were lines at every gas station. I was trying to get out to get to the grocery store. I couldn't do that before I got fuel, and you had to wait in line. I'm like running out of gas as I'm waiting in line. These are things that I've never really,we've never, had happen to us in our Western culture.
Laura: Yes, and you literally think it will only happen in a movie and no, no, no. That creates fear. We haven't even talked about the election. I don't even think we need to talk about the election but...
Emily: We haven't talked about all the different things that seem like are going crazy in our society, of all the Revelation things, all the things you read in the New Testament about what things are going to be like in the last days, feels like is happening right now. The morals declining, all the things declining.
Laura: That's right. That's right. Yes, it has been pretty intense, I think, worldwide. No matter where you're listening to this, I know some people in other countries, you've experienced this for much longer than we have. We, in our safe bubbles of America, are certainly waking up to something. All of that said, as a mom and as a person, it feels a lot scarier. Perhaps it was always this way, right? There was always the possibility of this happening, but now, we're living in the reality of having a small taste of what it looks like to not have all of our conveniences and all of our comforts, and even our Christian freedoms pulled away.
Now I think we're seeing, "Hey, we need to make some changes." I think we have some choices here ahead of us. That's why Emily and I really want to talk about this topic, because she and I were talking about fear and what is it and why does it matter? Are there good fears? Are there bad fears? That's what we want to talk about throughout this whole series, because what we're talking about right now are very real realities in our lives. As moms, I think we feel an added responsibility to provide for our families, and so what do we do with that fear that we experience?
Emily: Yes, we want to get into a lot of our timeless fears in motherhood and the things that, whether it's 2020 or anytime, make motherhood in and of itself a scary enough gig at some times.
Laura: Yes, seriously. [laughter]
Emily: So much so that we laugh about it and joke about it, but people will intentionally put off motherhood or avoid motherhood in different ways because of some of the pressures, and responsibilities, and fears that come along with it. As a mom, obviously, we're thinking about the health and safety of our children, our children getting sick, making sure we're doing the right medical care, we're meeting their physical needs, all of their spiritual needs. Are they going to spend eternity in heaven? Am I doing enough to share the gospel with them?
Laura: Just the biggest question ever.
Emily: That's the biggest question ever. Am I preparing them for adulthood? Are they going to know how to have conversations with people when they get out into the world? Are they going to know how to do their laundry? It just goes on and on. We can fear like, "I'm not giving them enough. I'm not going to equip them well enough. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do all the things." All of that can feel very, very scary.
Laura: Yes, I think oftentimes I won't realize that it is fear driving my motivations and emotions, but when I start digging into a lot of these questions, Emily, that you're mentioning, I realize that's what’s driving so much of my decisions today—the fear that they will be non-contributive to society.
Emily: Yes, or they're going to turn away from their faith or they're going to—like some big thing is going to happen for them. We haven't even really gotten into our fears for ourselves as moms and who we are. I think there's even the fears we face of social rejection from friends. If I parent this way, somebody is going to cancel me or they're going to reject me. Kind of “not enough syndrome,” like that low undercurrent of guilt that we have because we always feel like we're failing or maybe our marriages aren't the same as they used to be, our bodies aren’t the same as they used to be, we aren’t hitting our career goals or whatever, and we're afraid that we're not going to achieve all the things we wanted to achieve in motherhood. There are so many things. This list could go on further.
Laura: We haven't even talked about the statistically unlikely fears. The fears that are like freak accidents—or I don't even want to mention this to a room of moms— so pass over this if you want—but just the idea of your child being taken. That is absolutely terrifying. I bet there is not one mom listening to this show that has not ever at least somewhat thought about that. I think there's fears of your child getting lost, of getting abused. Even weird legal implications. I know that I saw some stuff going around about moms who left their kiddos in cars, and then they had a criminal record. Their reasons seemed pretty logical in my mind, but I could almost see myself, put myself in those situations and feel like, "Oh my goodness, I could have done that. That could have been me." It sounds so wild, but at the same time, so did a global pandemic.
Emily: I know.
Laura: It becomes ‘anything is possible.’
Emily: Yes, and even as our culture changes and is less and less accepting of a Biblical worldview, I think we fear losing the freedom to even raise our children in the Lord the way that we want to, or school them in the way we want to, or discipline them in the way we want to. I think there are very real legal things coming our way that can feel like, "Wow, Lord, how am I going to be faithful to the things you want me to be?" It just goes on and on, the fears that we have, and even like you were saying, Laura, something that's statistically unlikely doesn't make it less scary to us a lot of times.
Laura: Right. That's exactly right. I feel like that's my big question: how do we navigate these things and how do we categorically put them in our minds of what fears to care about and what fears to let go. Em and I were talking quite a bit over the fall. You guys are listening to this in the spring, you're listening to this in February probably. We're recording this back in early winter-ish, late fall. We're in the middle of coming off the election, coming off—we're actually currently in a shutdown, the second wave of the COVID shutdown. We've been talking a lot about fears and we have put them into three categories.
Emily: Because as we're talking about these, I think we see for sure the category of natural fear or warning type fears, which are good and protective. Sometimes we'll joke about like a bear chasing you. You guys have seen those memes, like the only time I run is when there's a bear chasing me, which is never.
It's the things that trigger our flight or fight response. It's like that red blinking light in your life that helps you turn away from something that you shouldn't be doing or change course before something bad happens. Actually, even as I was reading in scripture earlier this weekend, I can't remember, it was one of the psalms or proverbs, but it was talking about how God's word and God's commands actually serve as a warning for us to turn away from things that are harmful for us. Fear can be an incredibly helpful tool.
Laura: Such a good thing. It can really protect us.
Emily: Praise the Lord, he gave us fear.
Laura: Praise the Lord that we have some of that. I think we're going to get to talking and then realize that some of that is definitely pre-fall. This is a great kind, this is that warning kind, I like to think of this sometimes as my momma gut that tells me, "Hmm, something is off here. I need to change course. I need to dig into that."
The next one is certainly a really obvious one for all of us, but it's a sinful fear. This is a consequence of the fall. A lot of times, I feel like I experienced this with some of those statistically unlikely fears that we're talking about. It's usually the best way that I can show an example, which is when we're simply just failing to trust God and rely on his promises to us because of course, bad things can happen, difficult things can happen, and God is asking us to simply do the next right thing, according to what he has commanded in his word.
I think that when we believe that there's something more powerful than God or more sovereign than Him or something that could control our lives or ruin it more than God taking care of us, we start to put something else on the throne, and we start to say, "This controls me, this rules me," and usually, that is a fear of something.
Emily: Yes, and even as you were talking, that made me think, sometimes it's not always a statistically unlikely thing, sometimes it could be a fear that starts out as valid and reasonable, but then it starts to take an inappropriate amount of space in our thoughts, in our hearts, and it starts to overly control our actions. Things can be a legitimate concern or something that maybe we need to prepare for, but then it can get distorted and become this thing that really starts controlling our actions and our emotions and all those different things, which shows that we're not putting our trust in the Lord.
Laura: Yes, exactly. I think a good example of that comes from me is when I'm making a decision out of fear, like what I'm going to feed my kids, and it becomes all-consuming. Or perhaps, where I'm going to send my kids to school. Very real boots-on-the ground decision, where I feel like, like you're saying, it was helpful and it was something that was important, but then I'm allowing it to ruin my whole day and it's all I can think about, and it's controlling my attitude whenever I am interacting with my kids or with my husband. Whenever you're like, someone's like, "Man, what's going on? There's something more going on," and you'll be like, "Sorry, I'm just afraid or I'm just worried about it." Maybe that's a good example.
Emily: Very good example. Another type of fear...
Laura: Last one.
Emily: That is the best kind of fear...
Laura: Ooh.
Emily: -The fear of the Lord. This is a right fear. Another way to say it is religious fear. This is our fear that draws us to see who God is and then who we are in relation to who God is. It really is a fear that puts us in a place of humility, that looks to the Lord for all His holiness, and His righteousness, and His goodness, and it drives us to obedience to all that He has commanded.
Laura: Yes, I think that when I think of fearing the Lord, it's not really something that we do, but it's something that is a state that we live in. It's this perpetual posture or state of being for us. I think it's worshiping him as King on the throne. It's the exact opposite of what we were talking about with sinful fear, where I was kind of saying, "Hey, you're putting that thing on the throne, whatever it is that you want to achieve, or you're afraid of happening, or you're afraid that won't happen."
Instead, when we’re fearing the Lord, we’re putting him in the right place, as Emily was saying. It takes a very humble posture to get there, but I think that we can see that the boundary lines have fallen from pleasant places. David talks about that in the psalms. I think of that often. When we are within God's commands and we are living inside of his ways, then whatever happens, we don't have to be afraid because we trust that God has his best for us in mind and we'll never miss out on it.
Emily: Right. It's like, do you want to know what's really scary? Living outside of God's ways.
Laura: Yes, yes, yes.
Emily: That is so scary.
Laura: [laughs]
Emily: I think we need that perspective shift. Proverbs 4:19 says, “The way of the wicked is like the darkest gloom.” It is this horrible, destructive way, and fearing the Lord helps keep us inside those pleasant boundary lines as we are in Christ, because we don't want that, right?
Laura: Right.
Emily: I think we need our fears reoriented because sometimes we can be so oriented around the things that we're scared are going to happen in the world, when we realize, no, the scariest thing is being outside of God's commands, will, and way for us.
Laura: We are starting to hit our time limit, so we are going to wrap it up here. We want to leave you guys with a principle to just think on and chew on until we come back next week and continue talking through this. We're actually going to work through the gospel old school. Kicking it old school style, Risen Motherhood style. We'll do that next week.
This week, we really want you guys to consider your fears and remember that, hey, they're not always wrong. They're not always bad. They're not always something that you should be like, "Oh, I shouldn't be afraid of that. I don't want to deal with that," or just push it away. Instead, take into account that feeling you have, whether that's in your body, your heart rate is increasing, you have adrenaline, you start sweating. Or, it happens in your emotions, where it's just all you can think about, it's just everything your mind is centered on and it's almost like you can't unplug it, or sometimes I think of it as the sticky glue on my brain and my heart that I'm like, “I don't even know how to separate it.”
We want to challenge you guys to start, first of all, thinking through these three types of fear and thinking about, "Well, this thing that I'm afraid of, which one of those is it? Is it a natural fear, that warning fear, is it a sinful fear, or is it a proper fear of God?" Then, you can ask some questions that undergird it as well and help you understand it.
Emily: Yes, this is kind of similar to examining our hearts when we're thinking about idolatry and going, "What's really underneath there?" Not just taking the emotion or the feeling at face value, but having, I like the term ‘compassionate curiosity’ and going, "What? Why do I feel that way? What is driving that?" In doing that in prayer saying, "Lord, examine my heart. See what's in me, and then help me walk according to your paths."
That's really what we're going to be doing and diving into more on each show throughout this series. We’ll be examining our fears in light of the gospel, talking about how we fear the Lord, how we deal with it practically. We have a lot more for you on this topic.
Laura: We hope you guys will tune in next week. If you haven’t yet, check us out on social media, we're @RisenMotherhood on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and of course, you can always find us at risenmotherhood.com where you'll find all sorts of resources. We've got show notes on this topic where we'll be compiling some other helpful resources and other supplemental things. Yes, we just hope that you guys will stay with us in this journey as we start this new miniseries, and we'll see you next week.