I would 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)
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.
