Sometimes a second look shows us that we didn’t need to be afraid after all.
My mama was a city girl. She grew up in town and walked to school on sidewalks. My parents moved us out to the country when I was just learning to walk. Mama taught me as early as I could remember to run away if I ever saw a snake. My daddy and granddaddy felt the same way. I grew up with a natural fear of snakes, all snakes.
I married a man who grew up in rural Georgia who shared my healthy fear of snakes, but in the past few years, we have changed our minds about them.
Our yard is very wooded. We have lots of squirrels, birds and chipmunks and even though we don’t often see them, snakes. Several years back, a Copperhead snake bit our dog. We never saw the snake, but the dog required medical attention. She fully recovered, and I became very wary of poisonous snakes.
The snake in the picture above, is a Kingsnake. It was hanging out near our hot tub last weekend. My hubby ran up on it as he was getting ready to work on the tub. As I walked around the corner, he called to me that a snake was back there. I froze.
“What kind?” I asked with dread.
He said it was a Kingsnake and I breathed a sigh of relief. Those guys kill the poisonous ones. It would be really foolish of us to kill one. Still, old feelings die hard and I watched from a very safe distance filled with fear of it, even though I knew it wouldn’t harm me.
It made me wonder about what other misplaced fears I might be carrying around with me. We pick up all kinds of fears over a lifetime. Some of them are good and keep us safe. It was certainly wise of Mama to warn me and my siblings about snakes. It’s not like you want to trust a five-year-old to discern the difference between poisonous and nonpoisonous ones.
But, as we get older, I think maybe it’s incumbent on us to figure out what we should really be frightened of and why. Adults shouldn’t fear all snakes or all spiders either, for that matter. Christians aren’t supposed to fear much of anything.
The Bible tells us, “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.” 2 Timothy 1:7
What does that mean? Maybe it means that we need to ask ourselves what kind of fears are we carrying around. Unfounded fears simply hold us back from living in freedom. They imprison us. If we have needless fears, we can always pray about them and give them to God. He can replace them with peace and power and then we can live as we are supposed to, eyes focused on Him.
We may find through prayer, that most of our fears are nothing more than Kingsnakes, not Copperheads.
Have an awesome day!
Wendy 🙂