What I Have Learned About Fearing What Might Be

Most of what I have feared never happened.

I wish I had understood that sooner.

For a long time, fear made many of my decisions for me. It did not always announce itself as fear. Sometimes it sounded like wisdom. Sometimes it sounded like responsibility. Sometimes it sounded like faithfulness. It told me to be careful, to wait, to hold on, to not do anything rash.

And sometimes that voice was right.

But many times it was simply afraid.

The fear had a shape

There was a season when I could see that my years as a pastor were coming to an end.

I was worn down by the daily grind of ministry. I was tired in ways that sleep could not fix. My marriage was not working. My body had been through a great deal. And I knew, somewhere deep inside, that something was over.

But I could not see how to end it.

Ministry had paid me a good salary. It had given my life structure, identity, and a place in the world. And years earlier, I had faced cancer.

That last part gave my fear a very specific shape.

I may never have insurance again.

I may never be able to get another job.

Who hires a former pastor in his fifties with a cancer history?

Those questions felt reasonable. They felt responsible. They felt like the kind of thing a mature person ought to think about before making a major decision.

So I held on.

What actually happened

Three months after I resigned from being a pastor, I was already working in a job that had better insurance than I had ever had in ministry.

Three months.

I had spent years afraid of something that took three months to disprove.

That has been ten years ago now. In those ten years, I have never gone hungry. I have never been without a place to live. I have never gone without the basic needs of my life being provided.

I may not have as much as I used to have. That is true.

But the peace I have now, the happiness, the contentment, the freedom to simply be myself, the ability to rest and actually enjoy the fruit of my labor, has been more than I could have imagined back then.

The thing I feared most turned out to be the thing that never came.

Fear lives in what might be

I have come to believe that fear almost always lives in the future.

It is rarely about what is. It is nearly always about what might be.

What if the money runs out?

What if no one hires me?

What if they talk about me?

What if I am alone?

What if I am wrong?

Those questions can keep a person frozen for years. And the strange thing is that they are very hard to answer, because the thing they are asking about does not exist yet.

You cannot fight what might be.

You can only worry about it.

But once something actually is, once the challenge is real and in front of you, something changes. Your strength finally has somewhere to go. Your focus has somewhere to land. You can make a phone call, fill out an application, ask for help, make a plan, take the next step.

Fear paralyzes because it has no handle.

Reality, even hard reality, gives you something to hold.

The pattern I kept missing

When I look back, I can see that this was not the only time.

Years before I resigned, there were seasons when groups of people left the church. Every time, I was afraid the finances would not hold. Every time, they did.

When I left the religious organization I had been raised in, I held on as long as I possibly could, afraid of what my life would become without it. My life did not fall apart. It opened up.

Over and over, fear told me the bottom would fall out.

Over and over, it did not.

I wish I could say I learned the lesson the first time. I did not. Fear is persuasive, and it does not get less persuasive just because it has been wrong before.

But I am learning to notice the pattern.

What fear costs

Fear does not just make us anxious. It makes us stay.

It keeps us in jobs that are slowly draining us. It keeps us in relationships that have already ended in every way except officially. It keeps us in roles, systems, and situations long after we know in our spirit that it is time to go.

And staying has a cost of its own.

When we are afraid to let something end, we spend our energy protecting what is already past. We pour our strength into preserving a life that is no longer working, instead of building one that might.

That is one of the cruelest things about fear. It takes the energy we need for living and spends it on dread.

This does not mean fear is always wrong

I want to be careful here.

Some fear is wisdom. If you are standing too close to the edge of the rock, fear may save your life. If you have no plan, no support, and no way forward, fear may be telling you something true.

I am not saying every leap works out. I am not saying anyone should walk away from responsibility without thinking.

What I am saying is that fear deserves to be questioned.

Is this fear about what is, or about what might be?

Is it based on evidence, or on imagination?

Has this fear been right before, or has it mostly been wrong?

If what I fear actually happened, would I have any strength to meet it?

Most of the time, when I am honest with those questions, the fear gets smaller.

What I have learned

What I have learned about fear is that it is usually a poor prophet.

It predicts disaster with great confidence and is wrong far more often than it is right. It makes the unknown feel more dangerous than the known, even when the known is slowly hurting us.

I spent years afraid of losing my insurance, my income, and my place in the world. What I actually lost was the weight of pretending. What I gained was a life I could not have imagined.

That does not mean the losses were not real. They were. Some of them I will never get back.

But fear told me I would not survive the change.

I did more than survive it.

I found my breath again.

So maybe the question is not, "What if it all falls apart?"

Maybe the better question is, "What is my fear costing me while I wait for something that may never come?"

The DKP Word 2026
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