Engagement, Letting go of Fear, and Fuzzy Bunnies

Theme Song: “One Night, One Kiss” – The Russian Futurists

Current Projects: Client work, laundry, cleaning the bathroom

So, first off, I got engaged! YAY!  That’s a really good thing. Unlike the woman on tv who runs amok afraid of commitment and long-term relationships, I am in one, and it’s awesome. I was reading a post by Charlie Penn over at Man, Wife, and Dog on Huffington Post today about reasons why we should believe in marriage. There are so many good reasons to believe in marriage – if your marriage is a healthy one. One of the greatest things about marriage is that you have someone, presumably your best friend, there with you when the going gets tough. It’s amazing how many proverbial rocks can be flung at you in life. When you have an advocate, hanging out with you, believing in you, it makes everything that much better!

Then we come into letting go of fear. At my church’s sermon on Easter Sunday, the pastor talked about how when the three women came to clean Jesus’ corpse, there was instead an angel there. The angel said, first, “Don’t be afraid.” It got me thinking about a lot of things – this sermon. First, I thought about how many times we are afraid – and how that fear really does hold us hostage was a big point that resonated with me. Even with the firewalk last year, sometimes I still am afraid of things – all kinds of things! When you let fear take you as a hostage, you become frozen and cannot move. And it got me thinking – sometimes two contradictory fears can really mess with you – the fear of success and the fear of failure. If you’re someone who holds both of these fears, I can feel for you. I’ve been known to get “stuck” between these two fears myself.

The sermon accompanied a book I’ve been reading, Work Like You’re Showing Off. This book has a chapter on “letting go.” It’s important to be able to let go of stuff that holds us back. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about negative thought patterns. Yes, I did a firewalk – and that was *awesome!* I’d recommend it to anyone who has something they want to overcome in terms of fear. At the same time, I still struggle sometimes with self-doubt. (YUCK!) I think part of i
That gets me to the second thought on letting go of fear – sometimes we’re comfortable being held hostage by the things we fear – because it is what we know. If I were to let go of some of my hangups, the need to analyze everything, little nagging fears, etc., then that would mean venturing into an uncertain future. And that gets me back to the original topic of the post – marriage. In order to commit ourselves, we need to let go of a lot of past crap that’s hanging around. In some ways, there are lots of things that can go wrong in a marriage, but the truth of the matter is, it offers a lot of things that can go right – and there’s a lot of stability.t comes with analyzing everything – even stuff I don’t need to analyze.

Last year I did a firewalk (it happened to be just a few days before I met my fiancé). What are you doing to overcome your fears?