It is almost a week since the Lord provided us with this amazing piece of land. I spent the first few days in awe and wonder and humbled beyond measure. I love this land!
However, a few "little foxes" have made their way into my garden of praise: brown recluse spiders and wasps.
We have not seen any recluses at all. However, I spent the first few nights terrified that one might bite the children. During the day, I was praising the Lord, but at night I was overcome with fear and sleeplessness and haunted by bad dreams. Suddenly brown recluses were the hot topic on facebook (seriously, it was weird!). I am not afraid of spiders, in fact, of all the creepy crawlies, they are one of my favs. However, the idea of a poisonous one biting my babies was horrible.
Then the brown recluse spider fear was replaced by the very real wasp fear. The wasps are out in force and building nests around the buildings. Ever since I was a little girl, I have been positively phobic about stinging things. In Alaska, in the past few years, we have had some REALLY BAD hornet years. One day I killed 40 hatching queens in the windows of my house! They were so bad that it made the front page of the paper. I spent one entire summer inside, and the rest of the time I carried spray with me everywhere I went.
There are no wasps where we lived, so I have not been around them much in 13 years. However, they seem to be prevalent here. My fear that the kids would be bitten by a brown recluse was overcome by my fear that my son will be stung to death once he starts exploring the woods. The fear leaves a pit in my stomach and robs me of every joy that the Lord has given me. I was trying to figure out how to make the woods safe for us, so glad it was too wet to go back there yet, and sorrowed in my heart that after only a few days, the gift that the Lord gave me of this property was overrun by fear and dread. My praise started to ring hollow, tinged by terror and subdued by sadness. Not worthy praise for Him at all.
This morning, somehow, the Holy Spirit got through to me. When He teaches me an important truth, He usually starts by a simple question. I remember the moment He turned me from pro-choice to pro-life. All He put in my mind was "When do you think God puts a soul in a person?". At that moment, I knew I was changed forever--the Lord puts the spirit in the body at conception, and it is therefore a life.
This morning the question was more like "You trusted God with Ash's brain tumor. You trusted God with this property. Why not trust Him with these fears?". At that point, I knew. I knew that He had put me on a different path than one of fear and dread. Oh I am going to nuke the heck out of these wasp nests! But I am trusting the Lord that our every step is ordained, stings or no stings, and that He is God of all. I do not want my fear to overwhelm His blessing, because we can choose not to partake of blessing and instead cower in fear. But I am tired of fear. I am tired of the tight fist it makes of my stomach and the nightmares and sleeplessness it brings. I know this was a spiritual attack, but the Lord is using it to His glory by prying my fingers off of my fear.
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