Fear of man

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Fear of man brings a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord shall be safe. –Proverbs 29:24 NKJV

 

When I was about 5 or 6, I suffered from earaches.  I spent a lot of time with a heating pad on my ear as life went on around me.  My mother would drive me to a doctor 30 miles away.  The two doctors who owned that particular practice were from England and were nice, but I was so frightened of them.  Their accents, coupled with their starched white lab coats, made me tremble in fear.  Conversations drifted around me (I had lost most of my hearing so I missed a lot of what was said) about “putting tubes in her ears” and “infection.” I so wished I could just be home again where I could play with my pets.

This went on for months.  The visits never became any more comfortable for me.  My ear pain persisted.  People started shouting at me so I could hear them and their shouting felt  to my heart like spears of anger.  I remember tears flowing from my eyes on to the electric heating pad and wondering if I could get electrocuted as water met electricity.  Probably the worst part of losing my hearing was having people presume I was faking not hearing them.

And then to top off all those fears, I would have the same nightmare over and over.  In the dream, a bear would have me in its clutches.  He’d have my hair in a machine Dad would use to sharpen machinery blades.  It had metallic bristles and it turned and made sparks.  My hair was caught in those bristles,  drawing my head closer and closer.  I somehow got away from the bear, ran down the hill to my parents’ house and I burst through the door, telling my parents about the bear that was after me.  My parents, especially my dad, didn’t believe me.  Dad continued reading his newspaper.  I’d wake up from this dream and the fear from the dream would follow me into my waking moments.

So finally my parents took me to see an ear specialist.  He was even more scary to me than those English doctors had been.  He had an East Indian accent and worse yet, wore a scary round reflector on his forehead.  My palms sweated, I shook.  The doctor told my parents I was only a couple of weeks away from permanent hearing loss.  He prescribed a bright pink medicine that tasted kind of good and some brown medicine that didn’t.  Soon I got my hearing back and my energy too (I had been severely anemic).

So this experience, coupled with others, taught me to fear people.  And the isolation I lived in didn’t help either.  Perhaps if I had had more people around me, I would have become more used to people in general.  But I notice fear of man is very prevalent even among adults.  I’ve seen pastors who are afraid to stand up to the bullies in their congregations.  I’ve seen politicians who fear man’s opinion too much to take bold stands for what they know in their hearts is right.  I’ve seen women cowering to abusive husbands, sometimes hiding behind religion instead of facing the truth.

Yet, the Word of God has a promise.  If we trust in the Lord, we will be safe.  I’ve had to force myself to do things even though I was scared.  I notice all throughout the Bible it says “fear not.”  (I’ve heard there’s 365 “fear not” phrases in the Bible, one for every day of the year).  But the Word doesn’t say “tremble not” or “sweat not.”

So  about 20 years after my own earaches, I needed an expert opinion on my son’ s ears.  The ear specialist who had saved my hearing when I was a little girl seemed so, well so short and so not scary. I thanked him for saving my hearing when I was a little girl and even confessed to him how scared I was of him when I was young.

“You’re not scared now,” he said.  And I agreed.  Trusting in the Lord is a lot better than fearing man.