Faith vs. Fear

So last night as i was thinking before drifting off to sleep, and i had a very interesting point brought to my mind.  Some preface is necessary.  For quite sometime now i have been trying to make some decisions in my life.  Pretty important stuff i suppose, and as such i have gone before the Lord to ask some help.  I had been praying about some of these things for quite sometime and really hadn't received an answer.  Luckily during church on Sunday we talked about President Uchtdorfs talk entitled "Continue in Patience."  I recommend reading it because it is an excellent talk for anybody, patience is something we all need.  So after realizing that maybe i needed to be a bit more patient, and acting upon that patience.   I received an answer.  Its not something that is spelled out for me in black and white, it is something that i need to act upon.  A principle that i have learned, and now the Lord lets me choose for myself.  That is probably one of may favorite things about our relationship with our Heavenly Father.  He doesn't just solve all our problems for us, i mean what would we really learn.  In life we learn things best by doing, not by having someone else do it for us.  Is it harder this way?  Sure, but is it much more worthwhile in the end?  You bet!  So i felt impressed to pass on what the Lord taught me.  And oddly enough it goes along perfectly with some of the stuff i have been learning in Institute.  Coincidence...I think not!

What is fear?  Well according to m-w.com fear is "an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger."  We often speak of fear of the unknown.  And last night i realized that fear IS the unknown, or the fact that we focus to much on the unknown, and not on the known.  To help illustrate this well I'll illustrate it. 

So everything on the right side of what you know is the unknown (duh), and generally speaking we are afraid of that.  We as a people like to know things, when we don't know something we generally are afraid of it or at least don't trust it.  So what happens when we experience fear is we focus to much on what we don't know instead of focusing on what we do know, the faith portion of the drawing.  When we focus on what we do know, the basics, the simple truths, then it makes it so much easier to increase that total knowledge and continue on with the progression.   It doesn't matter if you know next to nothing, if you focus on that which you do know, then you can increase your knowledge.  But if you keep all you focus on the unknown, out of fear we will not progress in other words we experience damnation.   

Lets take an example something really easy.  Say you are hungry and you want to go try a new place to eat.  Now here if we focus so much on the unknown, like will i like this new place or is it gonna make me sick, or who knows what.  Any fear when it comes to a decision, in the end 9 times out of 10 it will stop you from going and trying out your new restaurant.  But if you focus on what you do know, like your hungry and your friend told you the place was good.  Well then you'll probably end up going.  I know a really trivial thing, but you can do it with anything.  I catch myself doing it all the time.  I stop myself from doing something because i dwell upon the unknown instead of acting upon what i know.  I may not know the outcome, but i do know what i know now.  And if i don't act then fear wins, and there is no progression. 

This is something I've probably known for quite sometime, but for some reason it never really registered, so last night the Lord answered my prayers, and now it is my job to act upon the knowledge that i gained.  So don't let fear overcome you faith.  Act upon the knowledge you have now and that knowledge will grow.  This applies to so many aspects of life whether the question is of great importance (normally the harder ones to overcome) or as trivial as lunch time.  Act upon what you know and life will be so much better!