Day 1. Do not fear


Over the summer something unusual happened.

One Sunday morning someone in our congregation came up for prayer. I happened to be on the prayer team so asked what is was she'd like prayer for and she said she was about to go on holiday and was really terrified, highly anxious, super stressed. I asked why. She said she just got really scared when doing anything out of the ordinary. She then said she had always ' suffered from anxiety'. When she said that, something triggered in me and I got really cross. Not cross with her. Cross with the lies which were causing her to be full of fear all the time about everything. I had a chat with her about fear, I prayed with her. She stood listening open-mouthed and said she had never heard anyone explain fear like that. She went off on holiday and actually messaged me half way through to tell me she was having a great time.

Two weeks later I was at Summer Madness. Youth festival with 2,000 teenagers from every sort of church background camping in a field for 5 days and experiencing the presence of God. Its a wonderful event and I was one of a large team doing prayer ministry after the main sessions.



One of the speakers was a chap called Dan Blythe who heads up Youth Alpha. Im pretty sure he wont mind me sharing this. His first talk began with him telling the young people that he was terrified of public speaking and he had been up at 5am that morning asking God to take the fear away. I was once again massively cross. I hunted down Dan after his talk and asked if I could pray for him. My exact words were ' Im on a one woman mission to eradicate fear ' 😆 He was happy for me to pray and listened very graciously to my theories.

After Summer Madness I was consumed by the thought that I need to do something about fear. Maybe run a course or host a podcast or something. I started to write a sort of lecture...... and this blog is going to be an outworking of my thinking so far. Hopefully with some helpful input from you lovely lot.

And what has this got to do with Christmas??

Well, as we shall see, the Christmas story is full of fear and 'do not fear' . But before we get to that we shall have to start at the very beginning. Its a very good place to start.  Hope you can join me tomorrow and for the next 24 days as we count down to the big day.

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