The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid? NIV
The other night, I saw “Facing the Giants.” In it, the main character tells one of his football players that the Bible says “fear not,” 365 times. So, this morning, I thought, “perhaps that is the source of what I had heard … that there were 365 reminders not to worry.” It reminded me of that game telephone, where a bunch of children sit in a circle, and you whisper something in the first child’s ear and then each child whispers to the next one and ultimately what the last child hears is invariably different from what was initially said. But, I have to say that I think worry and fear are synonyms in many cases, so the message didn’t get too garbled in this case.
I went in search of “fear nots,” in my concordance.
I am working from an NIV concordance, and there are lots of “fear” citations, but, I got all the way to the Psalms without finding a “fear not.”
I stopped here, because this verse looked interesting to me.
The Lord is my light … I love that. Things can seem pretty dark when you’re worrying over them. If the light of the Lord, which is truth itself, is shined upon a problem, it allows me to see the problem for what it really is. Some problems are really devastating, but, others are mere annoyances that somehow got out of proportion apart from the light of God’s truth. As I think about it, I don’t really spend any time worrying about big things. Instead, my worries consistently center around small annoyances that I cannot change or cannot control.
When I looked this up in another translation, this verse is downright cheerful, “Light, space, zest — that’s God! So, with him on my side I’me fearless, afraid of no one and nothing.” The Message
What a pleasant thought to start the day!
365 Days of Peace 