Fear feels like a guillotine waiting to drop…

I moved to California a year before my dad passed away from cancer. During that year I lived in terror of my phone ringing. I hated the sound of it. Every time it rang my heart would race and I would break out in a sweat. I knew that one time it would ring and I would answer it and on the other end would be my mother and she would say I had seen my father for the last time.

I lived under the constant threat of that phone call. It felt like living under a guillotine.

It was worse if my phone rang at night or really early in the morning. One time my phone rang about three a.m.. The caller ID said it was my dad. I picked up and all I could hear were hospital sounds and faraway voices. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I had a panic attack. I didn’t know what to do. No one responded when I said hello. But I couldn’t hang up and call someone else to find out what was going on. I couldn’t. So I sat there and listened to the distant voices and sounds of a hospital, wondering if I was listening to my father die.

It ended up being a pocket dial from his early morning dialysis treatment.

So the guillotine remained above me.

With our foster son, the guillotine phone call was a text telling us we had 24 hours to tell the boy we were going to adopt goodbye. I cried for a week after we lost him. I cried when I thought about my little boy waking up and crying for the only people he knew since he was 10 days old and us not being there to calm him. I cried every time I pictured him looking for me to tell him that everything was ok and I wasn’t there to do so.

I still cry when I talk about it.

The next guillotine phone call could be for my foster daughter. It’s still hanging above my head. Waiting to drop and cut out my heart.

 

Fear or faith?

Now, I understand that these may be extreme cases. And you could even say I have willfully chosen to put myself under the foster guillotine. But the truth is, it’s a risk you always take with love, foster or otherwise. To love at all is to be vulnerable. To love enough to save someone is to almost make yourself destroyable. But, if you’ll pardon the graphic analogy, all of us live under a guillotine of one type or another. Any of us who have ever loved, not for our own sake but for the sake of the other person, have left ourselves under the guillotine of fear. The fear of pain. The fear of hurt. The fear of loss.

Each of us are left with the choice to live in fear or to live in faith. Each of us get to choose whether we are going to have an outlook of fear or an outlook of faith.

The truth is, I don’t have a happy ending for you yet. I wish could say I do. Our baby girl is still a foster child. Our baby boy is still in another home. And my father is still gone. But that’s what it’s all about, having faith and trust. And holding on to faith and trust even through the valleys of hurt and uncertainty.

So I choose to have faith.

Faith that my dad’s strength will live on through me.

Faith that whatever strength I can muster will be multiplied through my children. Even the ones no longer with us.

Faith that the trust I show will be like a seed that will grow into something bigger and stronger than the fear hanging over my head.

I’ll leave you with this last thought: Despair and fear are easy. Trust and faith are hard. But fear never gives you anything in return. Trust and faith do.

Living a life of fear doesn’t return anything to you. Fear only multiplies into more fear. But faith and trust are checks you can one day cash. That day may be here or it may be in the hereafter, but it will come with interest issued accordingly.