of Power
of Love

Oops, did you happen to notice that it became a 4-part series? Originally I was going to combine the "of Love" section with "of Power" but the timing of Easter coinciding with getting to that part of the verse seem to need to have its own post. Because what greater love is there than Christ redeeming us at the cross?

Now to the last section of the verse and the main reason this verse has been such a comfort to me... "of a sound mind".

I have shared a great deal more personal information about myself than I ever intended to when I started writing these posts but how can I express the awesome faithfulness of God unless I share with you the trials that I have struggled through, that caused me to doubt, then made me strong and built my trust in God and His Word? My only consolation is that I think probably less than a dozen people are reading this (by the comments left) and I am not exposed to the whole world (just the internet... oh my!).

The beginning of this verse "God did not give us a spirit of fear" combined with "of a sound mind" has been such a comfort because my great fear was not having a sound mind. Chemical imbalances that effect your mental state run in my family. Growing up no one ever talked about the fact that my mother was institutionalized and received shock therapy 6 months after I was born. As with many things back then (the early 1950's), people pretended everything was fine. My mother's mother had some form of mental illness but was never diagnosed and everyone ignored it as much as they could.

When I turned 20 I noticed my mother was telling me weird stories about a neighbor and seemed to be acting a bit strange. I was the first to notice that she was easing into one of her times of imbalances. Later she was diagnosed as manic depressive. I was also the first of my siblings to realize that our grandmother had a problem. I think I was always the one who was a bit more sensitive to people's mental state and was always good at piecing together information and little snippets of conversations.

The awareness in my late 20s and early 30s of the fragile state of the mind began to weigh heavy on me. I had a brother who seemed to have gone through something, a sister who became anorexic/bulimic and went into a severe depression, a woman I worked for went into a depression, various cousins suffered from it... after awhile, so many people I knew were going into depressions that I thought it must have something to do with them knowing me! Had it not been for this verse, for my learning to trust God at His Word, I probably would have allowed fear to attack at the soundness of my mind.

Now before I go further, I want to say that I do not believe that lack of faith or trust in God is the reason for chemical imbalances or illness. Maybe your family struggles with diabetes, auto-immune system issues, obesity or alcoholism... no different. Most of us have something, my family's biggest struggles seem to have been with mental illness. God created us and knew from the beginning of time what each of us would have and for reasons I cannot truly grasp, He has allowed them. (I have some philosophical beliefs on this based on God's word and man choosing to sin but that would be for another verse, another day.)

Having said that, I do, however believe that for me had I not trusted in God's Word, I may had let fear overtake me. Many of the translations, sound mind is translated as discipline or self discipline. And that is what it took in order to hold firm to this verse.

In the first post of this series (Spirit of Fear), I mentioned the caverns of my mind and had I not had the light of God's Word to shine in that darkness; had I not been disciplined to God's Word, I think the darkness would have overcome me and I would have become lost in it.