Choose Faith Over Fear

There are people who, when you offer them a lifeline, answer with an anchor. I meet them every week—souls whose fear is so well-rehearsed that every solution sounds like a threat. And I recognize that music in their voices because once upon a time it was my own.

Those were the years when I was raising children alone and fear ran my days like a landlord. The mortgage envelope on the counter felt like a loaded gun. The refrigerator stared back with its hollow interior. I remember sitting on the floor beside the heating grate, calculating which bill could go unpaid without a catastrophe I couldn’t reverse.

I prayed, but my prayers were frantic—more like bargaining with a storm than speaking with God. I cried in parking lots and bathroom stalls. I could feel the despair in my lungs, tightening my breath until even my body seemed to give up. I truly believed I was drowning and that no one could see me.

Then an old friend came and sat across from me one night. He listened to the whole trembling confession—every worst-case scenario I held like scripture. When I finally went quiet, he didn’t argue with my fear. He simply said, You’re not speaking from faith right now. You’re speaking from the mouth of fear.

I hated how true that felt.

He offered solutions but I swatted them down like flies. I cried harder, insisting he didn’t understand. He looked at me with a stillness I resented—because it is infuriating to sit across from calm when your own world is burning. And he repeated, quietly but firmly, You taught me once that God does not abandon. Have you forgotten your own teaching?

I wanted comfort, not correction. I wanted to be lifted out, not to stand up.

It did not change that night. But it planted a splinter. Days later, when the panic had worn me thin, I could hear his words echoing back: You are feeding fear. You are not letting faith speak. So I did the smallest thing that could count as courage: I took one step—one act of faith with shaking hands, without proof things would improve. I said yes to the next right thing even though nothing in my bank account or body agreed.

And then the unthinkable happened: God met my one step with ten more.

Doors opened I wasn’t knocking on. Help came from angles I did not summon. Solutions grew like wildflowers in places I had only seen rubble.

That is how I learned the geometry of faith: Fear multiplies problems, but faith multiplies provision.

Life is different now. Calmer. But I still see the old reflex in myself sometimes, and in nearly everyone I guide—this talent for building cage bars out of excuses. We call them circumstances, but most are fears in costume. Fear says, not possible. Faith whispers, just begin.

Today I am choosing again. I am replacing the instinct to predict disaster with the decision to trust. Because if I could manufacture terror so convincingly, then I can cultivate faith just as fiercely.

And here is what I know now with my whole life as proof:

You do not need the whole path—only the courage to take the first step. Put one foot on the ground of faith and God will lay the next ten stones in front of you. It has never failed to work that way.

So if your problems look impossible this morning, remember this: the solution already exists, but it cannot reach you until you say yes. Say yes once—and watch heaven sprint to meet you.

Hari Om Tat Sat