Doug Losing Weight

Early in my career I had a trade show I was working in New York.  My travel agent booked me on a late flight, and my plane landed around midnight.  This was in the late 80’s, maybe early 90’s.  New York was a scary place, rumors of muggings were still the brunt of many a joke on TV and elsewhere.

There I was, a naive kid, flying into the big city by myself, in the dead of night.

I became aware on my hair raising cab ride to my hotel of how much fear we feel in our culture.  I wondered then what New York would feel like without any fear.  To simply walk the streets at that time of night with no concern, no worry, that was almost more than I could imagine at the time.  I wondered how people would treat each other in that kind of environment.

Over the years I’ve become increasingly aware of it – Fear.  It’s a huge sales tactic in our world.  Some bubble-headed bleach-blond pops onto our screen and tells us what is in our basement might be killing us, and encourages us to tune in at 10:00…

A guy knocks on our door with a vacuum in one hand and a sales pitch designed to make us fear that we are bad parents because there’s dirt in our carpet…

Radio instills all kinds of subtle fears into us – buy now before interest rates go up is the one that caught my ear this morning…

I have no tolerance for it.  Fear is a huge debilitating influence in our lives.  I’m almost certain we can’t even imagine life without fear.  Think of all the things you have wanted to do in your life, all the great things you were certain were within your grasp, or that you thought you might be  capable of if you just focused and tried – all brought to nothing through one fear or another.

So when I put in a CD from a company that I’ve “hired” to help me lose weight, to help me accomplish something in my life, and they start pumping fear.  Well, in case you didn’t read yesterday, I don’t react well to it.

So there’s some of the backstory.

I’ve learned that faith and fear can’t exist in the same mind at the same time.  Think of the ramifications of that.  If you are in fear, your mind is devoid of hope.  You become hopeless.  That hurts me all the way to my heart.  To think of me, and my terrific fellow human family walking around this planet without hope.  Breaks my heart.  I hope it’s not true.  I fear it is to a larger extent than should be.

So let’s keep track.  Let’s look inside and see when we are feeling hope, when we know we can do, and make a mental note how that feels.

Then when we lose hope, let’s try to see the fear that has driven it away.  I’ll bet if we can isolate that fear, put it in a bottle and turn it around and look at it, we’ll realize that the fear is pretty unrealistic.

Let’s take control…