No longer ruled by fear

 Parker J Palmer asks the question
 “It’s September, the start of the school year. For many kids, it’s an exciting growing edge moment and scary at the same time. When you’ve felt afraid on the growing edge of your adult life, what has helped you walk into your fear toward what excites you? What helps you keep fear from blocking your next steps toward your “deep gladness””

which prompted these thoughts for me. 

Much of my life has been dominated by fear.

Born into a fundamentalist church, my early years were filled with the fear that if I did not think and believe the “right” things and make the right decisions, as dictated by those in authority, i would be ineligible for heaven. Even more tangibly I knew that I could be shunned and shamed by the same Evangelical community that for all intents and purposes, had become my world
When I publically exposed the wrongdoing of the leaders of the evangelical community where I had invested nearly three decades of my personal and professional life I knew that my life, there, would be over. What “helped me walk into my fear toward what excites me” was the firm belief that I was following jesus off the road of a life defined by not displeasing those in power and into an exciting life of embodied solidarity with the powerless