Shaking Off the Shroud of Fear

This last year and a half has been very interesting, to say the least.

Though, to be honest, if you look at history, what we’ve experienced the past 18 months is not really all that unique and not anywhere close to the worst pandemics we’ve had to deal with.

Perhaps the difference is that we have white-washed death and dying to such an extent in our culture that many people have actually forgotten that one day they will be dead and buried — 6 feet under — and there is absolutely nothing we can do to change that reality!

Perhaps we’ve all become great, big control freaks and finding ourselves out of control as a nation and a world threw everybody into a bit of a tizzy.

Gotta say, this past 18 months has shown me my weaknesses — but it’s also shown me that grace is REAL and I’ve experienced God pouring His grace out over me and my family to such an extent that I would be lying if I didn’t admit that there were many unexpected blessings that came out of this past year and half.

In fact, all those years of praying laid a foundation that left me relatively peaceful through all the uncertainty of the past 18 months — even when my whole family came down with COVID and we didn’t know how we would react to it — for some reason, I knew God was WITH US and I wasn’t one bit afraid of the future.

That is, until John and I decided to do something crazy. We decided to leave the safety and comfort of our little Shire and step out of our door and go on a pilgrimage.

I mean the world has gone a little cray-cray and John and I had somewhat concluded that family pilgrimages to far off lands was likely a thing of the past — a bright little spot in our family history, but lost to the chaos of a world gone mad.

We had practically decided to accept defeat: accept that life had changed and the world had changed and people had changed, too.

Truthfully, I was afraid to throw my family into the tornado that is foreign travels during a pandemic and so we decided to book a trip to Florida for a summer holiday and give up all thoughts of our traditional family pilgrimage.

The problem was that we’ve learned how to travel abroad on the cheap and I happened to go online (bad idea!) to look up places in Santorini and I discovered this gem — and for the same price as our hotel in the Keys!

As a budget-minded traveler, it just didn’t feel “worth it” to go to Florida when we could go to Greece…even if it meant the possibility of dying there….ha, ha!

All of a sudden, I didn’t want to play it safe. I wanted to go for something that was amazing (and kind of scary) and when Greece decided to open up to non-vaccinated travelers with a rapid test, we knew we had to try! For families with little kids, it was really one of the only places we could go.

Wouldn’t you know it, a quick search revealed there was only one flight on Delta that we could find for the next 3 months that were covered by our skymiles balance — it left August 1st. Done! We found a flight home with our American skymiles account and we were going to Greece, baby! Hooray!

I was so excited — until I wasn’t!

It hit me like a ton of bricks: the gravity of my choice.

John and I had decided to take our most precious gifts in the world, our kids, with us to a far off place and we had absolutely no idea if we would end up quarantined or in a crappy hospital with a nasty Covid variant, or in one of the lively Greek protests we watched in the news as the Greeks took to the streets, unhappy with forced vaccine requirements.

The cases in Greece began to rise drastically and all of a sudden, I was regretting my decision. What had I done?!

I felt trapped…we had passed cancellation windows for a portion of our accommodations and it would be a bitter pill to swallow if we backed out…but I started to think we should stay home.

In fact, I began to lose sleep over the entire trip….so much so that I rarely slept past 3 am for a few weeks in a row…I was a complete and utter stress case.

I felt like I had a little glimpse into the fear and anxiety that so many people had been experiencing over the past 18 months…it was as if God stepped back with His grace and allowed me to experience what so many people experience every single day of their life.

It was kind of horrible, but also, one of those moments where you realize how much you have taken for granted the Grace that God showers us with, without our noticing it, ya know?

I was in complete and utter darkness at some points in those wee hours of the night…I was pretty sure we were all going to die in Greece, or at least a few of us get stranded there…and yet, I felt like I couldn’t back out…like I was strapped into a roller coaster, the end of which smacked straight into a brick wall…but there was no changing course.

I know it’s a bit dramatic, but like I said, looking back, there was a kind of darkness that was stopping me from seeing the reality of the situation and made it really difficult to gain perspective.

I even told John we should back out, and if weren’t for him, we would have. I knew God had something for us on this trip — this pilgrimage — but I still wanted to run away. Hard to explain, except to say, battling this darkness, was part of the pilgrimage for me.

If you are a person who deals with anxiety and fear on a daily basis, let me just say I have a little more understanding now and I’m so sorry you have to deal with this!

I got a glimpse into the havoc that fear and anxiety can wreak on a soul.

It wasn’t just a blanket of fear, it was a shroud of fear….a shroud that covered me until I felt like a person could die from the weight of it all…and I can only say that I never knew people lived this way and I’m grateful I got to experience it and understand how difficult it is to get out from under that fear, sometimes.

It was good for my soul! I spoke with a friend about it and she told me what I had been feeling in prayer: this pilgrimage was beginning weeks before we stepped foot on a plane and it was all about TRUST: Trust in God and trust in the goodness of people.

I get that this was a silly trip, but the thing about pilgrimage is that we’re kind of opening ourselves up to learning and growing and that can be painful — but God often uses silly little things to teach us bigger lessons that we need to learn.

Lessons like: the only way through anxiety and fear and really any difficult time is with God.

This silly little trip was in some ways a way to step out and grow in trust of God — and it reminded me of the importance of simples acts of the will — simple acts of trust when we feel God telling us to keep moving forward, even when we can’t see the outcome — even in the darkness — especially then!

So, I began to say two simple prayers every time I felt overwhelming anxiety: “Jesus, I trust in You. Help my lack of Trust” and “Jesus, hide me in your wounds. Never let me be separated from Thee.” I began a Novena to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots to remove the knots from my heart and my mind and the knots that were making this trip impossible.

Oh boy, did Mary deliver!

More on that later, but let me just say this silly little trip confirmed what I already knew to be true: Jesus never meant for us to live in fear and anxiety. He meant for us to be free…truly free…and if there is anything I have taken from this pilgrimage is Paul’s words, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”.

So get to know the Holy Spirit. Get to know God. Be set free!

He wants that for you and He wants that for me, and I want that for you, too, because I understand a little bit more about how it feels to be anxious and afraid and I know even more than I did before that we were never meant to live that way.

He created us to be FREE, but that takes work on our part, too. So let’s get to it, good people. Let’s learn to live free.

Happy Weekend to you!