Prayer, Distractions and Fear

Sunday morning, I decided to take the dog for an early morning walk.  It was about 6:30 am, the air was cool, the streets were quiet, and I began praying for my family, as Arby trotted along happily.  My prayers were really getting intense and I felt as if God was really listening to me. Arby and I turned the corner, only to see two unleashed pit-bull puppies tussling in their front yard.  I tried to exit onto another street before we were spotted.  As I headed down the side street and turned my back, I could hear the owner yelling, “come back here”.  I had to make a split second decision.  Do I quickly run down the side street with Arby? Or do we turn around, face the dogs and move closer towards the dogs and their owner?

We opted to face the dogs.  My fear was if I ran away, I would draw the dogs further away from their owners, which would offer us no protection.  So I decided to stay the course. They were puppies and they wanted to play, so they began sniffing Arby and tried to intimidate him.  He froze, as I tried to pull him away from the other two dogs.  About that time, the owners reached us with the leashes, apologized and we kept moving along our initial path. 

After three blocks, the adrenaline began to wear off and I remembered that I had been praying over my family before all the excitement began.  So I started in prayer once again and was immediately flooded with emotion.  It dawned on me that as I began to get closer to God and pray intentionally over my family, the enemy sent something to scare me and get me off of my desired path.  HE LOST!  As I picked up praying, where I’d left off, there was a great sense of calm that lasted for the duration of the morning walk.

Once you decide to place your family before God, there might be distractions sent to get you off course.  There will be a thousand excuses as to why you don’t have time to do this.  But if you face the distractions, overcome the fear, and live with intentionality, God will create such a peace in your life, which will spill over onto the ones that you love.  

In the last few days, I've heard so many messages about overcoming your fears.  Fear is a natural emotion given by God to protect us in times of danger.  There is an alert that goes through your nervous system that uses fear to equip you for battle or to enable you to run to safety (fight or flight).  The thing we must do is channel the fear, so that it propels us to move forward.  The dogs on our path were nothing but a distraction to veer us off of our course.  The fear that I felt was REAL, but when I channeled it and moved closer to confront it, the boldness inside of me sprang up.  We faced the fear, found out the situation was not as bad as I had initially thought, and continued moving in the same direction that we had set before us.

            I praise God for a Sunday morning stroll to reinforce how I can ignore the distractions and face the fear.

Now grab your sneakers and walk it out....