“Do not fear” is listed in the Bible 365 times.

Two types of fear:

Fear of God (Yirah): when we stand on holy ground, inhabiting a larger space than we are used to. Moses felt it when he encountered the burning bush. (Trembling and awe.)

Spirit of fear (Pachad: the fear of projected or imagined things)

The trip to Israel literally fell into my lap. I had dreamed about going to Israel for years but never felt it was a possibility. There was money, timing, and, worst of all, fear. When it came up as a possibility, the Lord immediately spoke to me and said that this was the time. This is the trip I should sign up for. The timing was right. I had enough time to save the money; the timing worked, so I signed up, still with a little fear in the back of my mind! Over the next few months, I shared with some friends that I was heading to Israel the following year, and two of my adventurous friends said they wanted to come too. Over the next nine months, we prayed about the trip. We all met multiple times as a team to discuss different details about the trip. We met our guide on Zoom. Everything was going smoothly. Tickets were lined up. Costs were lining up. The Lord was churning things in my heart with expectancy and anticipation for what I would learn there. He was speaking to me about how I would experience Him in a new way. I was definitely getting excited.

As long as I can remember, I have been terrified to fly. Like TERRIFIED! I did it as a child with my parents as needed, but not very often. When we moved to Mississippi, it was great because I could drive anywhere in the US and not have to fly. LOL

I get terribly sick on planes, and I have irrational fears about terrible things happening. Like, that scene in Bridesmaids where the lady sees a colonial woman on the wing of the plane and starts to freak out—yah, that is me 100%.🙂

The few times I have had to fly in the last 12 years, my husband has always come because he will sit by me and hold my hand while I play worship music blasting in my ear and pretend I am at a beach resort far, far away. It is a literal place I have to go in my mind.

I had to make a choice. Let this fear grip me from moving forward to new places in my life, or do I do it afraid knowing the Lord wanted to show me something new on this trip? I made a choice when I signed up that this fear was not going to stop me. It was lingering in my mind from day 1, but I knew if God wanted me to go on this trip, He would get me through it. I knew He would guide my steps onto that plane. Looking back, it’s hysterical that the Lord had my two friends sign up because otherwise I would have had to fly alone to meet up with the rest of the crew coming from other states. God knew way back in the beginning of the planning that I needed others to help me get there. (He is even in the small details, even when we do not see them.)

So about 5 months out from the trip, it was getting real. We were making sure our passports were in order. It was safe to travel. We were buying the items we needed. I started having dreams. Dreams of being on a plane and things going array. Dreams of storms coming out of nowhere over the ocean and our plane crashing. Dreams of medical emergencies with the pilots on board and us crashing into the waters. At one point, I even had a dream that the plane crashed and I survived but was trapped inside the plane and drowned. The dream was so vivid that I can still remember the feeling of not being able to catch my breath and the thoughts going through my head in those final moments. I would wake up anxious and sweating. The dreams continued to occur more often and become more intense. Then I started to notice that on news media or social media, as I was scrolling, articles and videos of planes crashing would show up on my feed almost every time I was on it! Mind you, to this point, I had told no one about my dreams or fear of flying. I had not vocalized any of this or looked up anything about it. These images just started appearing out of nowhere on my feed and on my phone. It continued to progress, with waves of panic coming over my body in the middle of the day. I would be stifled by fear, anxiety, and visions of the crash again and again. It started to give me panic attacks while I was awake. It was a rough couple of months. I continued to know that the Lord wanted me to go, but I was so clouded by this fear and anxiety that was gripping my thoughts and mind while I was awake and was keeping me up at night.

This is how the enemy works. He comes in very slowly. He comes in and sees a weakness we have, and he jumps at the chance to use it against us. He starts to infiltrate our thoughts and minds with things he knows will distract us from the Lord’s plan for us. He starts slowly and subtly, but he eventually starts to increase intensity to the point where we are so focused on the issue and our “feelings” that we can almost think of nothing else. I believe wholeheartedly that I was under attack from the enemy. I was tired from not sleeping well. I was exhausted from anxiety attacks in the middle of the day. I was not reading the Word on a consistent basis because I was hardly getting enough sleep to make it through the day. He was making it very difficult for me to see the light at the end of this tunnel. He was making it very difficult for me to stay in the Word and stay connected to the Lord because of all the confusion and mess going on in my head.

Don’t get me wrong. I was praying and seeking the Lord while this was all going on, but I could not see past the sleep deprivation or the lies of the enemy. He was wearing me down. I was doubting that the Lord wanted me to even go on this trip. I wondered if this was a warning not to go. I was starting to get very confused and overly anxious about the whole thing. Yes, it even crossed my mind to just give in and cancel it all together. I was very close several times.

About two months before we were set to go to Israel, I had a last-minute trip to DC come up for work. I bought the ticket and was preparing to leave when I said to myself, “I have no fear about this flight to DC for work.” I thought that was a very odd thing, seeing as how any time I thought about leaving on the Israel trip, I was overcome with fear and anxiety. I immediately realized that these last few months have been an attack by the enemy. I started to put together all the things that had happened over the past several months: the dreams, the attacks of anxiety, the news articles or images on my phone. I saw that something big was going to happen on this trip for me, and the devil was trying to keep me from going. The Lord was giving me clarity. He used a real-life situation to wake me up and see that I was being swayed by the enemy. I knew I was now in a battle, and I was not going to let the enemy win this one. I was fighting my flesh, but I knew I had to fight with my spiritual weapons. I was not going to win with just my might or my thoughts. I needed others help. (Ephesians 6: 11-16 Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes).

I am not a person who asks for prayer from others very easily. It’s a hard thing for me because of my past. It makes me feel needy and dependent on someone else. I can also feel like I am being a burden to someone. I often just want to handle it myself, between God and me. The Lord told me to fight for this. He had clearly impressed upon me that I could not do this alone and that I needed to bring this out into the light. I started by telling my friends who were coming on the trip with me and my group leaders what was happening and asking them to pray. I then called my family and asked them to put this specific thing on their prayer lists. I called my out-of-state friends and asked them to pray. I asked our prayer team at church to pray over me in person several times over the last two months. I even went to a friend’s home and had a prayer session with her. I wanted to be free from this fear and worry. I wrote down verses about fear and anxiety and read them multiple times a day. I stopped watching the news and even got off social media until I left. I made the decision that the enemy was not going to win.

The days were still hard. It did not break off in a snap of a finger, but I do believe those prayers held back some of the schemes of the enemy in my life in those months leading up to the trip. I still fought through some anxiety and fear, but not to the level of intensity that I had before. I held strong on God’s word and declarations that the enemy had no hold on me or my mind on this trip.

I did my part by inviting my spiritual family to pray with me and support me. I did my part by talking to my doctor about any safe medication I could take to settle my nerves and my sickness. God did his part in supplying me with travel friends, so I did not feel alone. He supplied people to encourage me and pray for me along the way.

Stepping on that plane that day was a small thing to most, but a huge step in my spiritual journey of not allowing fear or anxiety to keep me from the promises of God in my life. While I still had human anxiety, there was a peace that surpassed all understanding when I sat down and buckled up. I then slept the WHOLE plane ride over. The Lord supplied little joys all along the trip and the blessing of no delays or lost luggage! LOL

This trip was life-changing, to say the least. There will be more to come on the journey the Lord brought me on while in Israel, but THIS day was a triumphant day. It was a day in my life that I can look back on and realize the enemy was at work, but the Lord won! (John 10:10: – The enemy comes only to steal, kill, and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.)

We have to make a choice some days to do things afraid, knowing the Lord will sustain us. We have to realize we need others to pray for us and to help encourage us when we are weak. We have to be brave enough to step out and ask for help and ask others for prayer, even when it’s uncomfortable. There is POWER in prayer. There is POWER in praying over each other.

I tell this story because I want people to be reminded that we are all human. We all have fears. We all have a real enemy keeping us from our purpose and our growth in our relationship with the Lord. The enemy distracts and manipulates situations and things to make them look or feel like we should not do them or move forward with them. He creates confusion and a lack of clarity. He does all these things often in the dark; most often, I have found them for me in the night. In this case, though, he was bold enough to come out in the daylight and try to take this from me. The spiritual realm is not weird, it’s not pretend, and it’s not a joke. The enemy will do anything he can to steal, kill, and destroy our happiness and our precious relationship with our Heavenly Father. We need to be ready to recognize his schemes, and we need to be brave enough to ask for help from others when we cannot carry the load on our own. Sometimes we need to do it afraid.

2 Corinthians 12:9–10 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Picture: Sea of Galilee at Sundown