Day 2: Death who?

God left nothing that is not subject to Jesus. 

Yet at the present time we do not see everything subject to him. 

Since we have flesh and blood, he shared in our humanity 

so that by his death he might destroy the devil, who holds the power of death. 

He freed us who all our lives have been held in slavery by the fear of death. 

Pastor Mitch talked about David. David killed the giant Goliath. He killed him when no one else even had the courage to face him. David was only a teenager. Pastor Mitch says that we all have our own Goliaths that we can defeat when everyone else is still afraid of them. 

My Goliath is death. And the fear of death.

I was 'held in slavery by the fear of death.' When I was 17, a girl I went to school with asked me if she could practice her palmistry stuff on me. She took my hand and told me that my life line was the shortest she had ever seen. She told me I shouldn't be alive. I told her I didn't believe in any of that stuff.

I think our words have power beyond what we usually think they do. Even though I told her I didn't believe it, and I honestly didn't believe it, three years later, I realized I had been living my life assuming I would die young.

I didn't go to college after high school because I believed I was needed in the mission field. I believed that I had a big part to play in bringing people into God's kingdom and that he was asking me to sacrifice what I wanted to go and help him out. I went to England with a one way ticket and a plan to go on to Slovakia after I was done with missionary school. I can't imagine what my mom went through.  I believed that I wouldn't live past 25. Now where could I have gotten an idea like that...?

I told her I didn't believe it, but some part of me bought in. A radical missionary teaching at my school in England asked me questions that led me to realize the lie. She prayed for me and then God gave me a dream for the future. I started imagining being married some day and having kids and running my farm and making goals and plans for a future I had never believed in before. 

Sometimes I still fight the fear. Sometimes I'll find myself in panic over whether my baby is breathing at night or work up a whole scenario in my head about what I would have to do if my husband didn't make it home from work. But death is my Goliath. So when I start to fear, I repeat a form of John 10:10, "I came to bring life and life abundantly."

Death has been defeated. Jesus took back control. He decides who lives and dies and I know I can trust him. He gives life and he wants us to live it to the fullest.