What Are You Afraid Of?

When I was a little girl, I thought there was a monster under my bed. I usually only thought this at bedtime, not during the day, perhaps because I was too busy playing to consider the possibility. But with the darkness of bedtime, those thoughts of monsters made themselves known. My dad had a solution, though. Rather than trying to logically argue the fallacy of monsters, let alone monsters under my bed, he offered a means to mitigate the imaginary monsters under the bed. He said that if I positioned myself in the middle of the bed, the monsters couldn’t get me. To a four or five-year-old, that makes sense. Monsters, at least the ones I imagined, did not have the ability to bend at the torso, and I slept fine from then on.

Monsters under the bed are no longer a problem for me, but my sleep has been disrupted on occasion by other “monsters” or things that make me afraid or anxious. Author Barbara Brown Taylor has suggested that “redemption is embedded in the things that cause us the greatest anxiety.” The idea that something good for me could be hidden in the situation that is creating anxiety or fear is off-putting, especially since we often think that happiness or goodness should not be accompanied with any sort of stress or uncertainty. But life is uncertain, so it makes sense that just because I don’t know how a situation will be resolved doesn’t mean it won’t be OK, maybe even good. If redemption, that act of being saved, is built into what makes me afraid, then it offers me a steady space to stand, regain my balance, and trust that I’ll know at the right time exactly what to do next. These monsters can’t “get” me because they were not designed  to. Redemption is part of figuring out the solution, and I can sleep just fine when I remember that.