“He/She will have no fear of bad news;
Her/his heart is steadfast, trusting in the Lord.” Psalm 112:7
I’d like to share with you a Bible passage that has been a tremendous help in reorienting my thinking about how to live fearlessly each day. It is Psalm 73:23-26:
23 Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.
I have this mental image of God holding me by my right (i.e., dominant) hand, leaving my weaker left hand to hold all worldly things/circumstances with a loose grip. Even when the bad things really are unequivocally bad, God can bring good out of the bad things in our life, as we are told in Romans 8:28:
28 We are confident that God is able to orchestrate everything to work toward something good and beautiful when we love Him and accept His invitation to live according to His plan. (The Voice)
Therefore, I want to hold on to both the worldly good things and the bad things that I experience with a weaker left-hand grip. We will eventually lose our grip on good worldly things and bad worldly things, so I want to keep a light grip on them now, never holding good things too dear, or obsessing about how bad the bad things are (and may I remember bad things may turn out to be good things after all as God makes Romans 8:28 become true in my life).
Rather, as Moses says repeatedly in Deuteronomy (10:20; 11:22; 13:4; 30:20), I want to "hold fast" to God; cling to Him. He has promised that He will never let go of us. Also, I will hold fast to my love relationships with other believers. God and other people are the only things that we can hold onto in this life that will be able to be held in the next. All earthly “things,” good or bad, are subordinate to the fact that I’m holding onto the only One that really matters in life with my strongest grip; and that God rewards me for that commitment by assuring me that everything is going to turn out okay. In fact, it will turn out perfectly. My prayer for you is that you too will come to know the good news that God has for those who are confronted with really bad news.
Towards the beginning of my clinical trial period, in year 8 of my fierce battle with my sarcoma, I received the results of my first CT scan after starting the drug. The oncologist said the results were “mixed: one lesion in my lung had increased in size, one had decreased and two were the same size. Given what I’ve said here, how should I have interpreted this finding: good news or bad news? The answer for me was neither. It was “left hand news” to be held lightly, but with deep gratitude to God for continuing to provide the anchor of good news that will never change. I had no idea what I would learn from the next CT scan, but the news I hope you will cling to is the good news that I clung to as I went through my bad news journey: God’s unfailing love can get you through anything you can experience on this earth.
God does not promise a life free from fearsome things, but he does promise that when you abide in him you can have a life free from fear:
4 He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.
5 You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
6 nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.
14 “Because she loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue her;
I will protect her, for she acknowledges my name.
15 She will call on me, and I will answer her;
I will be with her in trouble,
I will deliver her and honor her.
Psalm 91
You too can have ”...no fear of bad news, [because your] heart is steadfast, trusting in the Lord.” Amen to that. May God’s presence be very near to you each day as He holds you by your dominate hand. Living this way allows us to be like Jeremiah’s tree when we go through the heat or drought periods resulting from the bad news events in our lives:
Jeremiah 17:7-8 (Selected Versions)
7 [Most] blessed is the [person] who believes in, trusts in, and relies on the Lord, and whose hope and confidence the Lord is. 8 [That person] is like a tree planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such a tree is not bothered by the heat
or worried by long months of drought [i.e., bad news events]. Its leaves stay green, and it never stops producing fruit.
I’m grateful beyond measure that God can produce fruit like that in the likes of such a weak- kneed person like me.
