Living Fearless at Home

OK, so today we get to talk about fear and being fearless in your home and in your family.

OK. So I think of this moment in our life where we were scared to death. You know what I'm talking about? I think I know where you're going because there aren't many times that we've been scared to death.

I mean, frozen. It was two or three a.m. Yeah. I woke up in the middle of the night because there was a TV blaring downstairs and none of our kids were in the home at the time. And so I thought, did we leave that TV on?

But it was so loud. And so I wake Dave up and I said, did you leave the TV on? And the TV is right below our master bedroom.

So I'm like, there's no way that TV was off. Welcome to family life today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson and I'm Dave Wilson.

And you can find us at family life today dot com or on our family life app. This is family life today. Also, the TV clicked on it, but then fear grabbed us like, what if somebody's in our house? So I said watching TV, I said to Dave, you go down, you go check it. I said, I'm not going down. And then I said, we should call the police. We go over, lock our bedroom door. I'm so embarrassed to admit this. We call nine one one. And I did it first.

I'm like, I'm just calling because I didn't even want you to go down. So we asked and we said our front windows. You can look through. Could you just come over and look to our front window and tell us if there's somebody in our house?

And long story short, they actually did. The fear I felt in that moment was so real. Fear is a real thing. And we've got Kevin Thompson with us today who's written a book called Fearless Families. Obviously, it's not about being scared at night, I don't think, is it? Not completely.

It's a lot bigger than that. The subtitle is Building Brave Homes in an Uncertain World. And Kevin, you're a pastor, right? And been a pastor how long? Almost 20 years. Next year will be 20 years to be at Community Bible Church in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Yeah, with two kids.

Two kids. Yeah. And you're the lead pastor of Community Bible Church.

Correct. OK. And written a few other books. But let's talk about this one, because, you know, when you talk about fear and you start the book with a story of fear, even in your own home with your own son.

Tell us that story. So whenever you have a TV blasting at middle of the night underneath your bedroom, there is a certain God-given response to that. Your heart raises.

Your adrenaline gets pumping. You're ready to go. You're going to fight or you're going to flee or you could freeze.

And it goes all the way back to the idea of our ancestors being out on the prairie and a possible danger coming out on the horizon. And in that moment, they had to make a choice of what is it that we're going to do? Are we going to fight? Are we going to flee?

Are we going to freeze? Those are great responses when your life is truly in danger. That is a horrible response, Dave, when Ann says we need to talk. And yet what happens in our homes and what happens in our lives is that same response then rises up in these emotional moments when our lives are not on the line. But in reality, instead of fighting, instead of fleeing or freezing, we then need to engage with our whole hearts, with these people that we love.

And yet instead we respond out of this fear response, which creates trauma within the family and everywhere else. My response every time and said, let's talk early in my marriage. And usually it was a conflict. I literally walked out of the room. You're so right. It was this built in.

I didn't even know it. Fear, you know, conflict, talking, communication is bad. You avoid it or you fight and it ends up ugly.

And there were times I just froze as well. So, I mean, what you're talking about is so true. But man, you talk about leading a family or trying to create a home that's fearless.

How do we go? Because that's built in us. It's really a gift from God in a good way, but it can be very negative, right? And think about the era that we're living in. I mean, if there has ever been a time where fear is running rampant, it is right now. And our families are facing it.

Absolutely. And I think the first thing that we have to do is to recognize and to source that God-given response, but understand it was given for a God-intended purpose. And so the places that we are tempted to fight, flight, or freeze, we have to recognize that, recognize this is not the place for that, and then make a different choice. And that's really what the book is about. The book is about the concept that fear is really ruling our lives in a way that is destroying us. And what's happening is we're making decisions based on fear when we need to make them based on love. And in the home, in that moment, the home should be the one place that fear does not dominate. I think the home and the church are really the two places that God designed, knowing that we are broken people in a fallen world, fear is going to be overwhelming to us. And yet here are two institutions that He gave to us to allow us to learn, to explore, to choose the way of love instead of the way of fear. And yet sadly, so often in the very place that God has given us to begin to diminish our fears, they actually are increased. And I think about the church of the afraid, I think about the home of the afraid, and how in these places where God desires for us to learn how to make choices based on love, we are making them based on fear. And what's scary to me is we don't realize it. We don't recognize that.

Yeah, and what happened? How did we get there? I think that's a great question.

I do think it's just part of our sin nature in part that God did put this design within us, and now as fallen people in a fallen world, it's all changed in many ways. I start the book with the story about Silas, fourth grader at the time. We lived two blocks down from the school, and so it's always a fun time.

We hold hands and walk up. This is about the age in which Silas is kind of aware that he's holding his dad's hand. And I remember one day he runs off as we get to the edge of school and runs off and my sixth grade daughter looks at me and goes, that's okay, daddy. He's just trying to be somebody.

And I thought to myself, aren't we all? But one morning we get up, normal routine, go to school, and I get to the door and he's not there. I think he's forgotten his lunch or his backpack. I call his name.

He doesn't respond. And I go look for him and I find him hiding. And in that moment, my world changed because anxiety that he had been having and was building, the noise in his head that had been building for years, finally expressed itself. And what began for us from that moment was a journey in which we realized how he was struggling with anxiety, which is genetic. I feel it, too.

He got that from me. But what I learned in the next two years is it wasn't just a genetic component of an anxiety that was going on. But as he was going through his issues with anxiety, I noticed that his anxiety was creating anxiety within me and that literally fear begets fear. And our home was becoming so tense because we were literally making every decision based off of how can we keep him safe? How can we lessen the emotional trauma of what's going on?

How can we make him feel the most comfortable? And there's an aspect of parenting where we need to do that. But there's another aspect of parenting where that's not really our job. OK, Kevin, like just hearing this, I'm thinking so many listeners are resonating right now because I've talked to more parents than ever before in my life that their children are experiencing anxiety, fear and depression, which is just exactly what you said is now stirring that up in themselves.

And we feel paralyzed. And every parent that I've talked to, they're saying, help, we don't know what to do. That's kind of the journey that we went on is as we recognize the fear that was going on in our own homes and ultimately the fear that was going on in my own life. Some people call this a parenting book, Fearless Families. It's not a parenting book. It applies to parenting, no doubt. But we think parenting book of here's what parents should do to raise kids.

This really is for me. Here's what I need to do to endure parenting. That's what it really is to me, because I don't think I ever realized how heartbreaking parenting truly is.

And that's just on a normal day. That's just in normal circumstances and how my nature tends to go back to the concepts of fear. And I will make decisions based on that. And what I came to find out is that whenever fear becomes the prism through which we're making all decisions, we begin to lean on and even make idols into some concepts that really are false gods. The very first one I talk about is the concept of safety, that safety is a good thing. Who doesn't want to keep their children safe? Clearly, we need to keep our children safe.

And yet that is not something we can fully ensure. And so when safety becomes the ultimate God, I call it the foundation of the home of the afraid. The home of the afraid is built on the foundation of safety. We believe if we can keep our kids safe, if we can experience safe, then we can build on that foundation and then be strong. But the problem is you're a pastor, you're a pastor's wife, you all know that life can turn in an instant.

The phone call can come, the diagnosis can be there, the global pandemic can suddenly show up. We understand that while safety is something that's wise to discern, it cannot be something that we idolize. Think about this.

Is it safe? How often do I ask that question? It's a wise question. I need to ask it when I let my kids go out with their friends. I need to ask it when my wife wants to go on a vacation by herself as a pastor.

I have to ask it as the church is planning a mission trip to a place. I need to ask that. But for me, it's become the primary question. How many times did Jesus ever ask the question, is it safe? That's a great question. He never did.

Never. And never called us to do so either. And that to me is convicting. In what ways does that become an idol? Define idol, because I know where you're going and I agree, but I want to make sure we understand this concept.

It becomes, what's it mean it's an idol? Tim Keller would say a great definition and we're all just students of Tim Keller. He would say it's a great definition is when a good thing becomes a God thing. So when something good becomes the dominant thing, which for me in many ways, that was the running question with my son, is, is he going to feel safe? Is he going to feel okay? And what happens is we get involved in counseling and the counselor looks at me and goes, Kevin, your job here isn't necessarily to make him feel as safe as he can.

It's as he's going through the circumstance that he knows he has your support, that you're with him in the midst of this, not to rescue him from this. And that's different, isn't it? That is radically different and it changes the question. And so whenever we talk about that idea of safety, it is wise to discern and to ask the question. But it becomes an idol when we make it the dominant question. Here's what scares me for the church of the afraid. If you ask the majority of our people, they would equate safety with God's will.

That's a great point. They would think God would never call them into something dangerous. Well, is the mission field safe? Is it necessarily safe at your job to testify about Jesus? Is it safe for the friendship for you to bring up Jesus? Is it safe even maybe in your marriage to make decisions based on Christ? It may not be safe, but it might be the right thing to do. And so often Jesus calls us into risky things.

The first time we took my oldest son on a mission trip to Africa, to the bush, and it was going to be really rugged. And I remember a couple of parents that we were saying, hey, go with us, because it was really parents and their son or daughter. And I remember a couple of parents said to me, that's the most unsafe thing I would ever let my son or daughter do.

They're 13 years old. It's irresponsible of you to even ask us to consider this. I should have been wiser. I just looked at them like, that's your concern? Of course it's unsafe.

I mean, it's as safe as it can be, but there's not 100 percent safety in walking out to your mailbox today, really. But they were unwilling to let their son or daughter and themselves go anywhere near that. And as I came home from that trip with my oldest son, I'm like, that was life changing.

He'll never be the same. And there was some fear involved. Of course, bad things could have happened, but safety became an idol.

Oh, there's no question. We bow down to and we lose what God wants to do in our lives, in our kids lives. So in the book, I make two divisions. I talk about the home of the afraid and the home of the brave. And I construct it as just a very basic, like third grade drawing of what a house looks like. So there's a foundation, there's a roof and there are two walls. And so the foundation of the home of the afraid is this idea of safety. Well, God invites us into a different foundation.

It's a foundation of trust. When we trust him, we learn then to trust one another. And the home of the brave is now learning how to trust God and trust each other. And Dave, what you were teaching your son in that moment is, you know what, these lives are fleeting. We can trust God with them and we're going to do risky things.

We're not going to be stupid. We're not going to seek out martyrdom, but we're going to risk our lives for something that is far greater. And in so doing, you were teaching him trust.

Not only were you teaching him to trust God, you were teaching him that you trust him, that you were instilling manhood within him, which is a powerful thing. And what you were doing is you were creating the home of the brave. And it doesn't mean that we ignore safety. Clearly, we take it into context and consideration. But it does mean that there are greater questions. There are greater questions of what's the right thing to do? What's the loving thing to do? What's pure?

What's noble? What's true? Those are all far better questions than what's safe. And whenever we prioritize the question of safety over what's right and what's loving, we have made safety into a God. And as soon as we do that, we're going to begin to experience the negative consequences of that.

But here's the thing. That is our natural bent. Our natural bent is that I will go back to this concept of what's going to keep me safe. Think about this within the context of an emotional discussion with your spouse. Why do we avoid that? Why do people basically have one of two reactions? If they're in the conversation, they either raise their voice or they emotionally shut down. In both cases, they're doing the exact same thing.

They're going to a place of safety. They're not willing to put their heart out on the table and to risk and to say, here's what I feel. Here's what has hurt me. How have I hurt you?

And they're not willing to have the meaningful conversation. And yet when a husband and wife trust each other, when you have the commitment to know that, you know what, there's nothing that you're going to do to break my love. And whenever you have the transparency to say, I'm fully invested in this and that trust is there, that I'm not going to use you or manipulate you. I am for you. I love you.

I have to remind myself of this all the time. Jennie is for me and she loves me. Everything she says is for me and she loves me. Her tone might be wrong at times, her words might be wrong at times, but her heart is not wrong.

She is for me and she loves me. And that trust then allows me to put my whole heart out on the table and to make a choice based on love, not one on fear. And what I really was surprised by in your opening story with Silas, you know, hiding because he's afraid to go to school. I'm reading that, you know, right at the beginning of the thing, it's fearless families. You know, Kevin's going to say, and I spoke into him and we got up and we went. And you end up taking his psychologist report because he sat down and to show it to your mom, right? He's been a teacher all these years and her answer to you and is, oh, now I understand you, your fear. I did not see that coming that you now are going to admit you had fear. And even as a dad, there's some anxiety and fear because we sit here and we think, OK, I'm going to lead the home of the brave. And that means I'm going to be fearless. But what happens when we're scared ourselves? No, that's exactly right. What I have found is that adulthood is far more scary than childhood. Right.

And I get it. We have better tools and we should navigate. That's not to downplay or diminish what our kids are going through by any means. But yes, my my son, we had him tested. We found a few learning differences that were there. So what he eventually was diagnosed with and he agrees that I can share this is with school refusal, which is apparent about one to two percent of the population, primarily boys, primarily fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade.

So around the beginning of puberty in some ways and primarily pretty intelligent kids. And so Silas was a straight A student, was a GATE student. He wasn't being bullied.

He was loved by his classmates. But what was happening is underneath there was these learning differences that we didn't know about. And it was creating stress within him. So school every single day was becoming more and more scary. And yet we didn't know.

We thought he was having a great time and everything was going well. So we had this testing done. Get this report. I take it next door to my mom. She's a school teacher for 40 years. She reads it. She looks up at me and she goes, this explains so much about you. And I was like, what? And I got to looking and sure enough, these things were evidence in my life early on as well. And now as an adult, they're just as present.

And I think what's interesting to me is so many of the things that scare you as a kid really don't come to fruition as an adult. Right. You watch cartoons. I've never slipped into quicksand. You know, right. The anvil has never fallen off the cliff and busted me in the head. But at the same time, the cartoons don't show the truly scary parts of life either. Bugs Bunny never got a bad diagnosis.

Right. You know, Woody the woodpecker didn't have his wife walk out on him. He doesn't know the possibilities as a pastor. We we experience that every day, how life can change in an instant. And it's it's far more scary, I think, as an adult than as a child. And so the reality of God's invitation of are you going to trust me or not?

Because here's the reality. When we idolize the question, is it safe? Who are we idolizing in that moment? Ourselves. We think it's all on us. And the amazing thing, the fear doesn't go away.

No, it doesn't work. You know, a week later, a month later, you're still afraid even though you're as safe as can be. It didn't touch your fear. A statement at our house for the last three years has been this. When you feel fear, you can avoid it and let it grow or you can face it and diminish it.

You can avoid it and let it grow or you can face it and diminish it. And so one of the great signs of the healing process for my son is now he'll say, and I end the book with this story. And now he'll say, Dad, I'm nervous. OK, well, tell me what you're nervous about. And then he'll begin to walk through maybe what the next day holds or what he's experiencing in the moment, whatever is going on within his own life. And then I'll ask the question, OK, what what tools are you going to use to help that process? What are the stories you're going to tell in your head?

What are the physical things that you can do? Are you going to work out? What are you going to do now? And so it's not as a father, it's not here's what I can do to solve this problem.

That's where I was three years ago. It was, oh, my goodness, my son is facing this. What am I going to do to save him? How can I make him safe? Whereas now it's OK. Let me help you and hopefully empower you to use the tools that you and I have learned to begin to diminish this fear. But in the end, it's not going to fully go away. But you have a choice to make in the end. Are you going to listen to the fear? Are you going to listen to love? Choose the way of love. That's what Fearless Families is about.

Now is also the way love is. How would you tie in faith? Because I often think of fear.

I always think of the tension. It's really between fear or faith. I guess you're saying trust is similar to faith or maybe even you're even saying love is similar. I'm either going to trust in faith or I'm going to be gripped with fear.

Yeah. The way I think of it in my mind, I'm not saying it's necessarily right. It's just the way my mind works is that the battle between fear and love are revealing what we have faith in. The reason I prefer to say it's a battle between fear and love is because when you define love now, not as a force that expresses itself in a feeling, but instead as a choice that expresses itself in an action, it draws the question back to, OK, you're feeling whatever you're feeling.

That's fine. What are you going to do about it? What action are you going to take? Are you going to take an action that's based on fear or are you now going to take an action that's based on love? And if you take an action based on love, you're doing so in faith. That is now an example that you have faith in God, not necessarily faith in yourself.

Yeah. And I've always said I think it applies to fearless families. It definitely applies to our personal lives in terms of your faith.

I've always tried to stress. And it's really where Jesus says about the size of your faith. Right. He says you can have faith the size of a mustard seed, which is minuscule and it can move mountains.

It can make a difference. And I've always grown up thinking I need great big faith. And she's like, no, you just need a little faith, but you need a great big God. And so I've always said it's not the size of your faith that matters, the size of your God. When somebody says, how big is your God? Am I going, oh, he's magnificent.

You wouldn't believe. Often I go, well, the way I'm living is I have a small God. And if you have a small God, you can have all the faith in the world in a small God. Nothing great is going to happen. You're going to live and be gripped by fear. But if you have a big God and just a little bit of faith, that's a fearless family.

And you're going to lead a fearless family. Well, I think that that's so good just because we're living in a time when we're all afraid. There are so many things to be afraid of and there will always be a lot of things to be afraid of. And yes, our God is so much bigger than our fear. It's learning how to trust him. You have Luke 12, 25, you're reminding us of that, which Jesus says, and which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life.

If then you're not able to do a small is a thing of just that, why are you anxious about the rest? I'm like, yeah, that's true. And yet our heart gets notoriously so anxious. But I think it's learning how to not let fear drive us. Absolutely. And we talk a lot in our house and in our church as well of the difference between worrying about something and weighing something.

Oh, that's good. So worrying about something is not productive. You're just ruminating in your head all the things that could go wrong and the decision that's facing, right? And it feels productive. It feels like you're doing something, but you're not. You're in the exact same spot. One of the tests now, if you're worrying about something, is you get stuck. Worry makes us get stuck.

We're in the same place three days from now that we are right now. Whereas we talk about weighing a decision, which is kind of like the old bank scales, right? You're going to put two options there and see if they equal out. So you have the known quantities of gold. So you have something that's unknown. You want to see how much gold this is.

You go into the bank in the old days that had these known qualities. They'd put each on each side of the scale until it equals out. At that point, the known defines the unknown. Well, you're weighing something. So we talked to our kids.

We talked to each other. Are you worrying about it or are you weighing it? Are you honestly saying, all right, is this the right decision or not?

Now let's move forward. That's the way of love. The way of love is what's the most loving action to take right now, today, and let the chips fall where they may? How can we discern that and do the right thing?

Safety comes into that conversation, no doubt. But it's not the ultimate God of what's going on. And the bigness of who God is does apply, which empowers us to choose the way of love. The way of love makes no sense if God is small because it's not going to work.

But if God is big, then the way of love is always the right way. And that is what then empowers us to have trust in Him and to choose that way. And then it's one thing to have a trust in a perfect, holy, just God who's never going to fail you. It's different for my son to trust me because I am going to fail him. I'm going to make bad choices sometimes. It's difficult for my wife to trust me because I'm going to fail her. There are times in which I'm not going to be the husband she needs or deserves. And yet for us to have a healthy marriage, we're going to have to learn how to trust each other, which now necessitates forgiveness and love and mercy.

It demands now for me that, man, the mistakes I make, they better not be life-altering mistakes that could just destroy her trust. Because when a family, when a marriage, when parenting, when a church loses that foundation of trust, there's nothing left to build the house on. And so if you don't have a trust of God, what good is the church in a vertical marriage? If you don't have the trust of God, the marriage can't be built up. And yet when that trust exists, when a husband and wife trust each other, there's no limit on what they can do.

When a person trusts who God is, there's no limit with what God can do with that person. It is easy for any of us to become fearful when our safety is threatened, when trust has been violated. And a spirit of fear, not just normal healthy fear of things we ought to be concerned about, but a spirit of fear, that does not come from God. God does not give a spirit of fear.

That comes from another place. Dave and Ann Wilson have been talking today with Kevin Thompson, who has written a book called Fearless Families, Building Brave Homes in an Uncertain World. We've got Kevin's book in our Family Life Today resource center.

You can go to our website, which is familylifetoday.com, to request a copy, or you can call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Ask about the book Fearless Families from Kevin Thompson. We've already heard this week about how social media and screen time can be an issue for families.

There's a reason to be cautious and careful when it comes to screen time. Arlene Pelican has written a book called Screen Kids, and we're making that book available this week to any Family Life Today listener who can help extend the reach of family life. Help us reach more people more often through this daily radio program, the podcast, what we have available online, our resources, our events. You make all that possible as a Family Life Today listener anytime you get in touch with us and make a donation. Family Life Today is entirely listener supported. We depend on folks like you to be able to do all that we do. And again, if you can help with the donation today, we'd love to send you a copy of Arlene Pelican's book Screen Kids as a way of saying thank you for your partnership with us here at Family Life.

So make your donation online at familylifetoday.com or call to donate 1-800-FL-TODAY. Be sure to ask for your copy of the book Screen Kids, and thank you for partnering with us here at Family Life. And be sure to join us again tomorrow when we're going to talk about what happens in a family when mom or dad or both of them become controlled by fear.

When fear becomes the atmosphere in your home, what happens? Kevin Thompson will be back with us again. Hope you can be here as well. On behalf of our hosts Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.