On Feeling Secure

You can check every­thing off the list and still not feel secure. You bought gro­ceries, paid the rent or the house pay­ment, had your annual phys­i­cal, and checked to make sure the peo­ple you love are okay. Still, you may have nag­ging doubts in the back of your mind that there are risks you could or should be cov­er­ing. You just do not know what they are. You worry. That too gives you an illu­sion of being in con­trol, but deep down inside you know that does not work. Your mind goes over your per­sonal check­list again, and again, and again.
Being secure and feel­ing secure are not the same thing. The first has to do with tem­po­rary cir­cum­stances, the sec­ond has to do with faith. We put most of our ener­gies into the first — into try­ing to man­age our cir­cum­stances. Often, there is not enough men­tal energy left for the life of faith. Exhausted, we give up and let the sleep cycle take over — if it will.
May I sug­gest that you reverse the order on this one. Put your ener­gies into faith first, then see what you can do about your cir­cum­stances. Faith is real­iz­ing your deep con­nect­ed­ness to God. That con­nec­tion is not based on earn­ing a rela­tion­ship but on accept­ing it — per­sonal flaws and all. It is not uncom­mon to find peo­ple much poorer than you that actu­ally feel more secure. It is not about how much money you have. It is about look­ing at the hori­zons ahead with the learned con­fi­dence that your essen­tial needs will be sup­plied there, just as they have been in the past.
Faith is any­thing but pas­sive. It coun­ters its own fears aggres­sively — once you give it the per­mis­sion to do so. Courage is indeed the virtue behind all other virtues. Faith is bold but not brag­gado­cios. Some­times it feels like an anchor in a storm. At other times it is a bea­con in the dark night of the soul. You learn to relate to it in its many forms and moods. Feel­ing secure is often para­dox­i­cal. You turn loose and it comes to you.