fear
Just as fear can manifest as control masked as wisdom, fear can manifest as control masked as faith. In our current cultural context, these so often have opposing facades but the heart can actually be so similar. The root underneath seeming opposites can be strikingly similar.
So much fear grips and motivates us far too often.
Fear has a healthy time and place because really messed up things happen that we should be afraid of. But to remain in that state constantly is unhealthy. To live out of it, is not our design.
Fear manifests in such sneaky ways… You may think because you aren’t running and hiding, you aren’t afraid. But fear can lead us to fight as well. Whether we’re hiding or fighting is not the guarantee we are living from fear or not.
When we’re swept up into the swirl of thinking around us, being taught what to think not how to think, parroting lines when we haven’t wrestled with ideas or actually had conversations with real life people in different contexts from different perspectives, it’s easy to get swept up into the mob mentality and live in the fear of man and fear of losing control… whether we claim wisdom or faith or something else entirely.
We have more in common than we’d often like to admit.