“When I am afraid, I will put my trust in You.”  Psalm 56:3

In the last post, we learned a little bit more about Will and Put.  The two key parts of our God given design for moving in this world.  Will representing our intentions and Put being our efforts to put our decisions into action.

Truth be told, we have known Will and Put all of our lives.  Even as young babies, our “Will” brought us to our feet and our “Put” helped us understand better why we needed to be in motion.  In fact, Put was always looking for things to move for Will.  If you reflect on it, babies spend much of their time learning to move things, especially once they learn how to move themselves. In the first two years of any child’s life, some of the greatest lessons come in learning not to “put” certain things in their mouths.  As they mature, their wills become better controlled by their own decision-making rather than mom or dad’s constant reminders of “no”.  As life continues on, our Wills and Puts also continue to be stretched, exercised and challenged.

In that development, it is important to understand that Will and Put’s effectiveness in our lives is largely influenced and easily impacted by emotions, i.e., our feelings.  One of the most influential emotions is fear.  When sensing danger or feeling afraid, Will develops a tendency to answer every question or dream or hope with “no”, “not gonna”, or “isn’t possible”.  You know, the brick wall of the infamous words of “I can’t” that we all too easily throw out to keep our fears in check.  While we believe we are protecting ourselves through the shield of “I can’t”, the next thing we notice is that our world has grown smaller, darker and more apprehensive than before.  It’s almost as if Will has disappeared as he is no longer to be found in your decision making process.

Put, on the other hand, stops knowing what to do when Will disappears.  Filled with fear, she becomes too afraid to move anything.  She doesn’t know what to move out and what to move in.  She can no longer discern what to take out of the way to help Will, nor is she certain of what Will needs emotionally to make the best decision.  In a way, when fear invades you, your Will and Put often come to a screeching halt.

But sometimes, when Fear gets the best of Put, she goes into overdrive.  In her frenzy of trying to help Will, she unintentionally throws everything into disorder by moving too quickly.  Frantically searching through all the possible solutions, she only adds to the chaos Fear is creating rather than helping to bring stability and calm to Will.  As she senses Fear’s menacing influence, sometimes she haphazardly empties a closet or a cupboard that, in turn, only makes more room for more of Fear’s many friends: dishearten, anxiety, doubt, dread, panic, jitters, uneasiness, worry, discomposure–just to name a few.

Sometimes, thinking that Will needs to face Fear (without truly understanding whether the fear is truly valid), Put pulls indecisiveness from the shelf and replaces it with haste in hopes that Will can move forward.  But, before you know it, the situation has gone from bad to worse as haste often leads us to make mistakes in our judgment.  Other times Put mistakenly removes Will’s inaction and inserts manipulation or force to as a way to strengthen him.  However, what Will lacks in that exchange is what is often needed the most: the strength of self-control as controlling others does not lead to healthy relationships or exchanges.  Truth be told, the only thing we can really control is ourselves.

A crucial thing to remember for both Will and Put is that we are designed to feel fear–to be afraid–at appropriate times.  While they are not meant to control our lives, they will not be strangers to us.  God designed us to be acutely aware of their presence as our brain design speaks to this very matter.  There are portions of the brain that are activated when we sense fear’s presence. Learn more. In fact, those portions move quicker in determining our response than our conscious thought processes do.  It is why the emotion of fear will hit you first before you can even rationalize or contemplate fully why you are feeling what you are experiencing.

One of the portions of the brain that scientists largely believe handles our fear and emotions is called the amygdala.  It is a small twin set of almond shaped buds in the temporal portion of your brain.  More on the amygdala.  It is found in complex vertebrates including us–human beings. Id.  Yes, friends, that means all sorts of creatures feel and sense fear.  The amygdala’s role is to help capture, store and process emotion and memories. Id.  As it works to bring memory into our being, our brain encodes all that is associated with the event. Id. And with that memory, it stores everything relevant to what has happened: the date, time of day, smells, touch, lighting, weather patterns, sounds and anything else deemed remotely relevant. Learn more.

It is why people who have experienced something painful will sometimes flashback given the right environment that triggers their senses to tell their brain: “Hey, this is similar, shouldn’t we be afraid?”  It is also what brings back feelings of nostalgia when you smell something that makes you remember the love of another or an odor that represents being “home”.  Things like chocolate chip cookies baking or grandma’s banana bread cooling on the counter.  The data from your environment is being inputted into your brain to help with your decision making processes.  That input can, at the same time, trigger memories, good or bad, to come forward during the assessment of your situation.

So why is this important to know?  Because the feelings of fear (Fear’s friends) are embedded in the stored code of your experiences that have been relegated to memory.  What you have learned in earlier life lessons about fearful events can quite possibly influence your future decisions.

Our system of memory can have a direct impact on Will and Put when we believe we are facing something we fear.  Our brains are working faster than our minds to best assess the situation, and it pulls from prior lessons–stored as memories–to more accurately discern the threat level.  Thus, understanding better the role that the brain and nature has on directing our responses begs this question: Is there anything we can do to counteract fear’s affects when a situation triggers us to feel afraid?

“When I am afraid, I will put my trust in You.”  Psalm 56:3

Trust.  Not just any trust will help, but rather, it has to be our very own. Yours and mine; together we can encourage each other to trust, but we must take that step on our own to trust in God.  Now the interesting thing with Trust is that it acts like a connector of sorts to Will and Put.  Will helps with decisions and Put provides the support or effort to literally move those decisions into effect.  Now faced with Fear, we often find Will gone and Put frozen, or Will indecisiveness and Put in overdrive inserting and removing all sorts of things to try to reboot Will.  From a direct read of Psalm 56:3, it seems that the antidote to Fear gaining control over Will and Put is introduce them to Trust.

You see, Trust is quite different than Fear.  There’s an inherent and unshakable beauty that comes with Trust and it is especially visible when we look at Psalm 56:3.  Trust has the attributes of confidence, faith, hope, assurance, certainty, dependence, positiveness, safekeeping, trusteeship, and more.  See more about Trust.  Amazingly when we decide that we will put our trust in God, we are more directly linked with our Creator during that fear-inducing moment.  Let us remember, in our great concerns, that our God is the Creator of the universe.  He knows all of our days.  Trust, our emotional connector to Him, has a way of transcending all the frightening chaos without demanding full order, and hence, can override our overwhelmed brain and bodily systems.

This does not mean troubles magically disappear, pain stops and rainbows and sunshine appear.  Trust is exactly what Put needs to strengthen Will when we are feeling afraid.  Trust is what we need to counteract the disastrous effects of fear when it grows out-of-control.  Trust should be employed when worthless fears are nagging us and running down our ability to move in the appropriate direction.  It is not a trust in something tangible.  It is not in money.  It is not a trust in another soul, though sometimes God is so kind to send the support of others.  And it is not trust in our own strength.

“…I will put my trust in You.” (emphasis mine).

Our trust must be in God; truly and sincerely.  While it is very much a choice, it is really the only safe one we have when overwhelming feelings fall upon us.  Trusting in God is the key to calming Will and Put so that we can make the best decisions for our world and His.  Otherwise, it is Fear that begins to grow in controlling us, and friends, that allows Fear to gain the power and ability to impact His (and our) world in a way God did not intend for us.

Let us focus more on trusting God not just in the good times but in the more compelling times of fear.  It is crucial to the development of a deeper faith.  So, let us soothe Will and Put with the balm of the confidence that God is with us and ready to deliver us from the presence of Fear.  Let us choose to serve Him instead of the emotion He has designed in us, while understanding that even legitimate fears no longer serve to protect us when we are living our lives under their control.  Let us each see Fear, and its friends, for their limited value while letting God, and our willingness to trust Him, reign in our hearts, thoughts and decisions.

“‘If you are returning to the Lord with all of your hearts, then rid yourselves of the foreign gods and the Ashtoreths and commit yourselves to the Lord and serve Him only, and He will deliver you out of the hands of the Philistines.'”  1 Samuel 7:3-4