Don't Let Fear Keep You
From Your Assignment

Fear as an emotion has one job: to help us survive. Biologically, the emotion triggers our fight, flight, or freeze response in the presence of immediate or perceived danger. This emotion, when applied correctly, is what has allowed the human race to survive more than two thousand years, and yet it is the same emotion that keeps so many of us from living the full and abundant life that God promised those who follow him.

So the question I want to pose to you today is not what are you afraid of, because the reality is that it is irrelevant. The question is, how will you respond to your fear?

Before we dig in, I am going to give you a hint: when it comes to God's assignment for your life, regardless of how afraid you may be, there is only one correct response.

I, like many of you, have heard the parable of the talents preached and taught many times, and the one thing that I feel often gets overlooked is the fact that the servant with one talent was operating from a place of fear. Some may have seen him as lazy, others irresponsible, or the one who lacked faith, and all of that may be true. The text suggests that the third servant was given only one talent because the master believed it was all he could handle.

I often wonder whether he shared his master's belief that he lacked the ability to handle more, or whether he was just too afraid to find out. Either way, in the face of the weight of his assignment, the servant chose to do nothing — he froze. That raises a few questions about him and us: first, what in his past led to his master's perception of his ability, and secondly, what was he afraid of?

Since this is a parable, the servant was not a real person, though he represents the real experiences of many of us. This leads to the question: how many talents has God given you, and are you afraid to use them? The answer is easier to find than you may think, but first, we need to better understand this idea of talents.

It is absolutely absurd to bury the gifts of God. And yet so many of us do. Not out of laziness. Not out of faithlessness. Out of fear.

So what about the fear? Are we to believe that the servants who bore their weight well operated without fear? Or is it that they went into fight mode instead of freeze? The real question is, what will you do in the face of the weight of your assignment?

I wasn't a preacher or even a biblical scholar. I was so caught up in the education and titles that I didn't have, I couldn't recognize the power that I did have. So, much like the servant who froze under the weight of his assignment, so did I. It sounds less absurd until you consider the literal hundreds of copies that collect dust in my basement closet. Much like the servant, I buried actual money.

Like Moses, when we begin to question the assignment or freeze because the weight feels too heavy to bear, we are asking God the same question: "Who am I to carry this out?" The fear, the doubt, the questions cause us to forget that God didn't ask us for our resume — he is asking for our obedience.

I wanted to be obedient. Moses wanted to be obedient. And I believe that servant wanted to be obedient — because when it comes to the assignment God has given each of us, obedience, regardless of ability or fear, is the only correct answer. But how?

How is a question that I have not only had to ask myself, but one that many of the women I work with ask me. They come to me with a burden on their heart, the weight of an assignment they know God has given them. Yet the question of how to execute has them in a holding pattern — frozen on what step to take next. They are afraid to get it wrong, afraid to disappoint God, and so they do nothing. They bury the gift, the call, the answer to someone's prayer.

That fear, though, isn't always doubt in God — sometimes it's the inability to name what you've been given. You can't steward what you haven't identified.

It is how Esther saved her people. How David took down Goliath. And it is how you will live the abundant life God designed for you.