My great-uncle sat there, in his same ol’ chair. Precious man. And every now and then, he’d reach over and flick open a section of blinds to quickly peek outside. 

My grandmother, his sister, could never understand. Was he afraid? What was the problem? Why not open the blinds fully … see fully? The blinds weren’t broken. The light would be so good for him. Open that window.

“He needs to get out and walk, get out in the sunshine, soak in that Vitamin D,” my grandmother would say.

I don’t know. But I think he was broken. He’d had bad health since he was a young man. Somehow he had managed to continue working up through a decent retirement age. He and his wife never had a family. Something was heart-breakingly broken inside, was the feeling I got … maybe there was an area in his life that God hadn’t been quite allowed to heal. And the sweet man could gather tears instantly in his eyes. 

He was a tender soul.

But one thing I learned—fear is contagious. As the years pressed by, as my grandmother’s health began to decline and my grandfather had passed on to Glory, she became the one to peek out the blinds. Fearful. With the full light still warming and lighting the earth, come the touching threat of sundown, she began shutting up her home, shutting out fearful things. Imagining fearful things and voicing them.

The face of fear can be terrifying … hair raising sharp fangs and sharp claws. Or closed doors, closed shutters, four walls. No visible steps upward.

When life is hard on us … when we fear … when we don’t have the strength to open the shutters or doors … when we aren’t sure we can see God in the midst of it all …

when we are certain the light is just beyond the enclosure … when we can even feel its warmth … but we feel crippled …

It seems dark. We can’t seem to get out from under the sheet that we pulled up over our head and shaking body in fear, and we are suffocating.

What can we do?

Go low … to our knees, to our faces.

And look heavenward.

For The Light.

For just the glimpse.

The Light who is so good for us, who allows us to see fully.

And we can be mindful to pass that search for the Light on to others. 

Although we might be looking through our lives’ dust and dirt and pain, our focus presses through. Our children and their children will understand that though we might not have an ounce of strength, though we might be broken, though we might not can understand our lot in life, we know where to look for internal strength and understanding. 

We know who to make our glorious crutch. Our crutch is not an enclosure … our crutch is beautiful, peaceful … our crutch is alive. 

~~~

How do you handle fear? Have you ever been crippled by fear or witnessed a family member crippled by fear? What advice can you give?