I’m not afraid of this world.
There was a time when I became very, very afraid. Like when I first became a Christian and it was that scene from The Stepford Wives all over again. I’d look around, and I’d see nothing but blind people more concerned for their caramel macchiato orders than the truth happening all around them.
I used to be one of those people. Hardcore.
In the beginning, it’s scary. You lose everything you know. You lose yourself, or at least the person you thought was yourself. You lose friends or people you thought were your friends. You look up, and you’re alone.
But then you remember, you’re never really alone.
I used to never feel alone growing up. Even without submitting to God, I could feel Him even though I denied it. Sure, I had horrible phases of anxiety and depression and the loneliness that seeps in came with the whole shebang. But I almost felt like someone was watching me, reading me like a character in a book.
What’s happening now all around us doesn’t surprise me. There’s no fear in my heart.
If anything, it gives further evidence of what the Bible has said all along: we are losing ourselves and taking each other with us.
It’s easy to do when you refuse to bend your knee.
I wrote a poem once called “When We go to the Butcher.” It’s about being taken and sitting in the back of a horse-drawn wagon and silently writing an apology letter to my daughter in my head. In the poem, I watch her face, her hands, the everything she’ll never get to be because the enemy’s won, and I’m helpless to save her from her fate. Here’s that poem:
WHEN WE GO TO THE BUTCHER
When we go to the butcher,
I’ll hold your hand so hard
my memory will seep
through your pores
and you’ll be looking
down on your little eyes
and little nose
and two lips glued
tight into a cherub’s smile
and you will hear my heart
at your ear
and the way it says “I’m sorry.”
When we go to the butcher
your father will be sitting
at my right and at my left,
an empty place where fear
resides, and if I could
be a something better.
we’d never be riding
in the first place.
When we go to the butcher
remember all those times,
but not just the good.
Remember me, a little
monster,
a fly off the handle,
hellish time of a girl
turned woman
turned something
turned and pickled
with fear’s empty space.
But when we go to the butcher
also know about my brave
little heart.
How courage is what lights
it a-thump.
And alights yours, too,
with my hopelessly
hopeful prayers.
But isn’t that every day though? The idea that we really have no control over anything?
Our children are not ours. WE are not ours. Ownership belongs to God alone and we are merely here to enact His will, one that trumps anything we could ever plan to do.
There’s no fear when somebody else is in charge. There’s just constant observation and a heart struggling with the reality of seeking light in the darkness.
And really, you can’t even hear the “I’m sorry” that plays on my lips anymore.
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Ericka Clay 
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