What if?

A few months ago, I did a Beth Moore study on Esther. One major theme that stuck out to me:  Esther was faced with a terrifying situation, watch her people be massacred; or face near-certain-death in revealing herself to be one of them, a Jewess, and trying to defend them. After clearly struggling with this impossible decision and having everyone pray and fast for her, she emerges, proclaiming, "If I perish, I perish." One lesson from this seems to be that even when we face our worst fears, God is present. Amen.

So then I was more recently considering the story of Jonah. And again, we have a worst fear realized, going overboard in a ship during a storm and being swallowed by a whale. I was afraid of swimming in deep ends in the dark when I was a kid because I was so terrified of creepy creatures in watery depths, even in man-made-pools (creative imagination I guess). I can not imagine the horror Jonah must have felt as he watched those jaws closing in around him. And perhaps again, we learn the same lesson. Even in the belly of the whale, God is present. Amen.

So what is your worst fear? Which "What if?" keeps you from moving forward with boldness into a place you should perhaps be stepping into? Here are a few of my worst fears, other than being attacked by deep-water creatures of course:
"What if those people reject and ridicule me?"
"What if I have to make it on my own without my husband?"
"What if my child dies?"

So the crazy thing about Jonah, is that in subjecting Jonah to a-worst-possible-thing, God was also preserving his life so that he could live out the most-glorious-thing. Thrashing around in the ocean during an intense storm? So many ways a body could drown and die in a scene like that. But Jonah didn't die.

I think of the book Outliers, or, because I was too lazy to read this as a book, the documentary film series, Guns, Germs, and Steel. One of the major take-a-ways for me in both of these was that the people who had endured the roughest suffering, came through as greater stars, as stronger survivors, or as more useful and potentially God-glorifying tools (that's my own imposition on the raw material there).

Perhaps: It is not in spite of the whale that Jonah becomes a hero, it is not because he was punished in the belly of the whale that Jonah learns his lesson, but it is because God used the most terrifying prospect to preserve Jonah that he might be able to go on to do God's work. Just like so many other biblical heroes. And scarier still, just like He might do for me some day.

My prayer: if the day comes that I have to face one of my worst "what if?" I hope I will be able to respond and say, "If I perish, I perish," and have faith that the realization of my worst fears might actually be an instrument of protection and preservation from the fears I could not even have imagined, like missing an opportunity to participate in God's glory.