Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
David prays, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil…”
No fear?! None? How is that remotely possible?
This guy must have grown up with unprecedented privilege, right? (Nope. He was a shepherd that fought off bears and lions trying to attack his sheep.)
He must have never faced real danger, right? (Nope. He went mano a mano with Goliath and was chased by his own murderous king multiple times.)
Well, he must not have known the depth of the darkness within himself, right? That’ll scare anybody. (Nope. He abused his power to sleep with his best soldier’s wife, and then orchestrated the poor guy’s murder.)
David was no silver-spooned goody two shoes. He knew darker valleys than most. And still, he could confidently say, “I will fear no evil.”
Can I live a life without fear?
Dallas Willard once asked his fellow church members in Van Nuys, California:
What do you fear? Whatever came to mind, I want you to know that you have nothing to fear. If you doubt this, I urge you to ask God to give you a peace about this. Let me say it again: no matter what you fear, you can live without that fear.1
It seems impossible. Most days, I readily admit, I fear things that a moment’s thought would render harmless.
Ironically, I learned the truth of these words in the most terrifying season of my life so far. I had lost fifty pounds. The doctor said it was lymphoma, but (as I wrote earlier) he could not give me a prognosis for five weeks. My wife was pregnant with our son.
I feared impending treatment.
I feared death.
But most of all, I feared never meeting my child. I feared leaving my wife to parent alone. I feared missing the beauty of their lives—what could have been our life—altogether.
The video below is from May 27, 2021—a few weeks after we received my initial cancer diagnosis.
And as I dug through the layers of my fear, my darkest valley, with my shepherd in prayer, here is what I learned.
Fear comes from the terrifying anticipation of future loss. Loss comes from attachment. Attachment comes from love. Both my love and the objects of my love come from God.
Instead of living on the surface of our fears, trying to banish them as unspiritual, we must become archeologists of our fears, delicately delving through the layers until we find God beneath them all.
If he gave us everything we fear losing, everything we love the most, can he not also provide everything we need in the valley?
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Dallas Willard, Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23 (Thomas Nelson, 2018), 32.
Still gotta process this one - to deeply walk through the ugly attachments and find where God is, where my longings actually lie.