Psalm 84:10 “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.”
I think one of the biggest blights the corona virus has spawned is the pandemic of fear. We’re afraid of getting sick, of making other people sick. We fear the consequences of wearing masks, of not wearing masks, of opening schools, of not opening schools. Of course, fear has been around much longer than COVID. But living in an atmosphere saturated with fear tends to wake up the bogie man hiding in us all.
I don’t consider myself a fearful person. I lean more toward worry than full-blown panic. But I’ve been peeling through some layers, looking for the root of why I recently reacted so negatively in a particular situation. Guess what I found. A puny giant inside me yelling through a megaphone of fear: FAILURE. FAILURE. FAILURE.
One of my biggest fears is that of failing. It makes me want to isolate my fragile ego from people who make me feel like I’m falling short. It masks my pride by tempting me to stay within the confines of what I can control. And perhaps worst of all, it messes with my mind, throwing me into a fever pitch of shame and hopelessness. I feel like I will never succeed at anything again.
But we can never truly fail if obedience to God remains our highest priority. For in him, even our “failures” are used for good. He desires to take every mistake, every blunder, every humiliation and use it to achieve his purpose of making us better humans. Humans more like him. So I can either feed my fear of failure by measuring my “success” on what other people think, or on what’s important to God.
I want to cultivate the psalmist’s mindset when he declared nothing compares to being close to God. He would rather live one day near him than a thousand without him. He would rather serve in a menial position (a doorkeeper) than thrive in a world devoid of his presence. The psalmist understood life is not about what we achieve, but about knowing God’s love.
And God’s love casts out all fear (1 John 4:18). That’s a pretty powerful vaccine.