What if the Thing You Fear Actually Happens?

It’s Monday, and this post was supposed to land in your inbox LAST Tuesday! Between a very full week of women’s ministry obligations and travel, I didn’t catch it until last week had already come and gone. So here we are, late, returning to The Screwtape Letters and a subject that feels especially timely in our world’s current climate: fear.

In Letter Six, C.S. Lewis drops us into the midst of uncertainty. The Patient has been called up for military service, and Screwtape seizes the opportunity. He tells Wormwood that the young man does not need to experience catastrophe; he only needs to imagine it.

Screwtape instructs his nephew to toss hypothetical situations the man’s way, manipulating his attention and driving his mind toward what might happen. Keep him wondering, anticipating, and mentally rehearsing outcomes that have not occurred but could. Lewis points out that God wants us focused on Him and on what we actually do, while the demonic strategy is to keep us fixated on possible scenarios that could, might, and most likely will not happen to us.

I had to wrestle with that for a minute, not because I struggle with anxiety, but because I’ve ministered to countless people who do. (By God’s infinite wisdom, He has allowed the weight of other dysfunctions to rest on me.) But isn’t this the way of our world? We stress over our lives and those of our loved ones, not because we are dealing with something in the moment, but because we might one day.

What if the diagnosis is serious? What if my child is harmed? What if my marriage fails? What if I lose my job? What if the economy collapses? What if the election goes the wrong way? What if something happens to someone I love? What if I cannot handle what comes next?

We live in a culture propelled by fear and haunted by the dreaded “what-ifs” of life. Fear drives headlines, social media algorithms, political messaging, advertising, financial decisions, parenting, and medical decisions, and sometimes even our relationships with one another. There is always another threat to consider, another what-if to absorb, another prediction to worry over. Because information is available to us 24/7, fear no longer has to knock on the door. We carry it in our pockets.

Recently, I heard a pastor make a distinction that has stayed with me. He said, “There is a difference between having fear on you and allowing fear in you.” I like that distinction because fear on you is human. Your heart races when the phone rings late at night. Your stomach drops when the doctor says, “We need to run another test.” You feel afraid when your child is hurting, when finances are uncertain, or when the future suddenly looks different from what you expected. Those feelings are not necessarily evidence that you lack faith. Fear is part of the protective alarm system God built into humans. It tells us that something matters and prepares us to respond to danger.

But the problem arises when fear shifts from a feeling we experience to a voice we obey. Fear gets inside us when it begins deciding where we will go, what we will attempt, whom we will trust, whether we will obey God, or whether we dare step into whatever God has placed before us. At that point, fear has begun occupying territory that belongs to the Holy Spirit.

Paul understood this when he wrote to Timothy:

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and a sound mind.”

—2 Timothy 1:7

We cannot know for sure, but Timothy seems to have been naturally timid, as Paul repeatedly encouraged him to endure, stand firm, preach, guard what had been entrusted to him, and not be ashamed. Timothy had watched Paul face hostility in Ephesus, a city where proclaiming Christ had disrupted the religious and economic system built around Artemis. Acts 19 describes a massive mob gathering in the theater, enraged because the gospel threatened their way of life.

Paul knew what it meant to face terrifying circumstances, so his encouragement to Timothy came from a been-there, done-that perspective. His courage did not come from never feeling fear. It came from refusing to let fear determine his obedience, and that’s exactly the battle Screwtape wants the Patient to lose.

Lewis touches on something about fear that we have probably all experienced. Anxiety has a way of pulling us out of the present and catapulting us into an imagined future. Before we know it, our minds are living in circumstances God has not asked us to live in or walk through.

Maybe you understand that feeling all too well. Fear is a horrible storyteller because it eagerly fills in the blanks of an unfinished story and rarely writes an ending in which God remains faithful. It pictures the diagnosis, the loss, the rejection, the financial crisis, the heartbreak, or the unknown future, but conveniently leaves out the God who has promised never to leave us nor forsake us.

So we begin by spending today’s strength on tomorrow’s possibilities and today’s grace on tomorrow’s imagined grief. Perhaps that is why Jesus repeatedly brings anxious people back to today:

“Do not worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

—Matthew 6:34

Jesus is not pretending that tomorrow will be trouble-free. He is reminding us to stay present in the here and now, because worrying about tomorrow saps our energy for the present.

In the book of Lamentations, we read that God’s mercies are new every morning. Like the manna the Israelites gathered in the wilderness, we gather the Father’s mercies day by day. Don’t you love that? God is so specific. Not every decade or every year, but every morning. I may not have today what I would need to survive some hypothetical future heartbreak, because I am not living that day yet. If it comes, I can trust that God will meet me there with the strength and mercy I need to walk that path.

Instead, fear asks me to imagine tomorrow without tomorrow’s mercy. But faith reminds me that whatever tomorrow holds, God will already be there.

This does not mean Christians ignore genuine danger or abandon wisdom. Wisdom looks honestly at what is true and responds accordingly. Fear takes what could happen and demands that we live as if it already has.

By the time Paul wrote 2 Timothy, he was in prison and nearing the end of his life. His circumstances were hardly reassuring, yet he could say, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to guard what has been entrusted to me until that day.”

I think there is something important in those words for those of us who desperately want God to tell us what will happen. We want the timeline, the diagnosis, the outcome, the answer, the guarantee. We want enough information to assure ourselves that everything will be okay, but God frequently gives us none of those things. He gives us Himself.

And then there’s this: Fear becomes especially powerful when I compare the size of my circumstances to my own size. Of course I feel overwhelmed when I do that. The problem may be bigger than I am, but faith changes the comparison. Instead of asking whether I am big enough for what lies ahead, faith asks whether my God is.

There is a beautiful picture of this in 2 Kings 6. Elisha’s servant wakes one morning to find that an enemy army has surrounded the city. I imagine he did what most of us would have done. He panicked!

But Elisha tells him, “Don’t be afraid, for those who are with us outnumber those who are with them.”

Can you imagine the look of confusion on the servant’s face? He peeks outside and sees an enemy army. Then he looks at Elisha and probably wonders whether the prophet has officially lost his mind. But Elisha knows something his servant cannot see. He sees the whole picture.

So Elisha prays, “LORD, please open his eyes and let him see,” and suddenly the servant sees the hills filled with horses and chariots of fire surrounding them.

I love that God did not remove the enemy army to calm the servant’s fear. The threat was still real, but the servant could finally see that the enemy was not the only reality around him. I wonder how often the same is true for us. We become so fixated on what frightens us that it fills our entire field of vision.

Perhaps this is where we can begin to change the question.

Many of us have spent a lifetime asking what if. What if this? What if that? What if the very thing I have begged God not to allow becomes part of my story?

But Scripture gives us another way to finish the sentence. Instead of allowing the enemy to keep us living under the tyranny of what if, perhaps we begin answering him with even if.

Even if the diagnosis is bad, God will be there. Even if my child wanders or the relationship falls apart, God will be there. Even if the disappears or the thing I have prayed would never become part of my story somehow does, God is faithful.

That is not denial, nor is it Christian positive thinking. It is the kind of faith we see in Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego as they stood before Nebuchadnezzar, facing a blazing furnace. They knew God was perfectly capable of rescuing them, but they did not presume to know what He would do.

“Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the blazing furnace,” they told the king, “But even if he does not…”

I have always loved those words because their faith did not depend on a particular outcome. They did not know whether they would walk out of that furnace alive. They knew that whatever happened inside it would not change who God was.

Even if tomorrow brings something I never wanted, even if God answers differently than I prayed, or even if the road ahead is harder than I imagined, God will remain God, and I will not walk that road without Him.

That is courage. Not convincing ourselves that the thing we fear will never happen, but trusting that if it does, the God who gave us mercy for today will meet us there with the mercy we need for that day.

So perhaps when the enemy begins whispering his what-ifs, we stop following him into every frightening possibility and remember the part of the story he leaves out. Elisha’s servant discovered it when God opened his eyes. Three men discovered it when they stood before a blazing furnace, unsure whether God would rescue them. And we discover it every time fear asks us to imagine tomorrow without God.

Whatever tomorrow holds, He is there, even if.