The Worst Case Scenario
It's so easy to let our minds and hearts wander off into the wonderland of worst case scenarios.
We get lost in the dark forest, blindly trekking along the rabbit trails fear leads us on. Every twist and turn of another thought of a worst case scenario sends us down, down, down into deeper dimensions of fear’s darkness.
But what if instead of striving to find our way through the chaos alone, instead of letting our thoughts run and ramble over “what if’s,” what if we paused along the winding road and asked God to show us what’s really at the root of our fears?
Instead of letting fear tell me what I ought to feel, think + believe about what’s to come, what if I chose to lean on the One who holds my future?
What if we let God in on the wanderings of our hearts?
What if we outed the thoughts in our heads so he could lead us out of the dark and into the light by giving us breadcrumbs of truth that will lead the way?
In the moments where I feel fear gripping me, I sometimes ask myself, “What’s the worst case scenario?” I’ll give myself the space to be honest about what I fear is the worst that can happen. This forces me to get real with myself, my people + God.
And by the end of dissecting and picking apart my fear, God often reveals to me the root of what it is that I’m really afraid of.
This week, the chance to confront some of my fears kinda snuck up on me.
On Monday morning, my close friend Melissa + I were talking and checking in on each other’s hearts like we normally do before jumpstarting our day. I shared that I was getting ready to head to another routine pregnancy checkup at the doctor, and she asked, “Do you have any fears you’re clinging to this morning about the doctor’s appointment?”
And in that moment, I had to keep it real.
For the last week or two, I’ve felt this baby boy of mine sitting suuuuper low and heavy. It’s almost like I can feel a lot of pressure “down there” since he’s so low. I know they say “every pregnancy is different,” but having not experienced this feeling of heaviness in my first pregnancy with my daughter, I wasn’t sure if this was all normal or not. It’s uncomfortable, but more than anything, I’ve realized it’s made me fearful.
So when Mel asked me that question of if I had any fears in my heart about going to the doctor, I confessed that I feared this uncomfortable pressure meant that the baby was going to come prematurely.
Then I felt God ask me, “and what’s the worst case scenario if that happens?”
I told Mel I realized that I feared if the baby came early, my husband and i would be totally unprepared:
We’re planning on moving, but haven’t found a new place to call home yet.
We haven’t bought any baby stuff.
So if our little one arrived early, we’d be scrambling to get things together.
But I felt my heart quiet within me, as if God was nudging me to dig even deeper beyond my valid yet on-the-surface answers. And when another worst fear rose up, I dreaded speaking the words out loud. But I let it out anyway and told Mel I think my real fear is that if the baby comes now, he’d be stuck in ICU and won’t be able to come home with us.
Then I felt God ask again: “Okay, and what’s the worst that can happen after that?”
I knew what the answer was, but again, the answer felt too raw, too taboo, too scary.
I’ve heard for so long in church that “death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)
So I was scared to let the words leave my lips: that if my baby was delivered preterm + we wouldn’t be able to take him home, I feared there’d be complications...and we’d ultimately lose our baby.
Initially, I think getting honest about this fear of made me feel ashamed, as if I was cursing myself or speaking death over life. But I think that was exactly what fear wanted me to believe, because fear...
fear thrives in silence.
I heard Bill Johnson say once that “when you believe the lie, you empower the liar,” meaning that the enemy of our souls really only has the power we give him—and that comes from us believing his lies over God’s truth + promises.
And so I realized that if I can’t speak about the wonderings of my heart & the darkness of my fears, that only puts me in a place of torment & shame, not peace.
I don’t think it’s God’s heart for us to silence our concerns about what’s happening or what’s to come. I don’t think we’re meant to be hush-hush about what’s really going on inside of us.
Instead we need to be quick to lay it all out there, to get honest + get vulnerable. I believe God wants us to acknowledge our emotions, confess them to him + our tribe, and most of all, hand them over to him. Because when we do, we’ll find it’s more of a blessing than a curse to be free from fear.
God is not intimidated by our emotions, especially our fears. He can handle them. All of it. He doesn’t shame us for how we feel. He understands the depth of every emotion we’ll ever experience. If anything, he leans in all the more, gently helping us to navigate through the dark to the light of truth at the end of the tunnel.
So after taking the bold step of sharing with my dear friend that I also feared we’d lose our baby boy, I thought that was it, that I had reached the bottom of my heart and all of my fears about my doctor’s visit were out in the open...
until God asked me one last time, “What’s the worst that can happen after that?”
I didn’t think it could get any worse than losing the baby you’ve carried within you for months and months and months. To never be able to hear their voice, hug them, see them take their first steps, graduate, or get married. It couldn’t get any worse than having to navigate through grief as a family. What could possibly be worse than that?
I got quiet, feeling as though God was searching the depths of my heart that I didn’t know were there...and he pulled out this...
“You’re afraid that your faith will fail & it would all be for nothing.”
There it was.
Beneath it all, the root of my fears was that I was ultimately afraid God would fail me, that the promises + truths about who God is + who I am in him that I’ve banked my whole life on would turn out to be a total fraud.
I was like, daaaaang, G. Didn’t see that one coming.
You know, I’ve come to find that fear has lots + lots of layers. (Obvi.) There’s more hidden beneath them than what we see, think and feel on the surface. But I wonder if every root of fear ultimately is rooted in trying to get us to come to 2 conclusions:
That God isn’t good, and that God doesn’t really love us.
It’s the same question that tricked Adam and Eve way back when in the garden of Eden, the same question that is the sneaky assailant of our hearts.
But in those moments of our fear + trembling are the times we ought to remember all the times the worst case scenarios didn’t happen at all, and the times when they did happen but we experienced a level of strength, beauty + love that we wouldn’t never known otherwise. That’s the evidence we can cling to for ourselves that prove God’s love + goodness is unfailing.
“God is all mercy and grace— not quick to anger, is rich in love. GOD is good to one and all; everything he does is suffused with grace.”
– Psalm 145:8-9 (MSG)
All throughout the Bible are God’s promises of his love and goodness. But these aren’t just declarations. It’s not just all talk. He backs it up: in the stories of imperfect, messy and often fearful people; in the midst of chaos, destruction and all hell breaking loose, he shows up; in the midst of storms and turmoil, he halts the wind + waves.
And I love how Romans 8:28 shows how that love + goodness is extended to us. It says this:
“So we are convinced that every detail of our lives is continually woven together to fit into God’s perfect plan of bringing good into our lives, for we are his lovers who have been called to fulfill his designed purpose.”
— Romans 8:28 (TPT)
All things work together for the good of God’s kids.
All things.
(aka everything.)
The good, the bad and ugly.
Our highs and our lows.
Our greatest joys and our deepest pains.
Our best and worst case scenarios.
So the dead ends of hopelessness that our fears are trying to lead us to, when in God’s hands, aren’t anything to fear at all.
Like gold in the fire, we will be refined, not consumed.
Even the very things that the enemy tries to use for evil to kill, steal and destroy us, God can + will still use all of those things for our good.
But what does it mean to be consumed? It means to destroy by being eaten up & completely devoured, to the point where there’s nothing left.
So this all means that no matter the situation, you + I will never know or experience the full effect of defeat because God–in his love + goodness–will always orchestrate our victory.
So though we may “experience every kind of pressure, we’re not crushed.
At times we don’t know what to do, but quitting is not an option.
We are persecuted by others, but God hasn’t forsaken us.
We may be knocked down, but not out.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9, TPT)
It’s not that we’ll live this life completely sheltered or exempt from the enemy’s attacks. He’s always seeking for the right time to try to take us out. But our strength + hope comes from the promise that none of his weapons against us will prosper (Isaiah 54:17).
The weapons will be made.
And they’ll be thrown your way.
But they won’t be successful in their purpose to annihilate you.
Instead, God’s plan + promises will always prevail.
I think fear and it’s intention in flooding our minds with the what if’s of worst case scenarios is to help our focus to be on the temporary and not the eternal. The here & now rather than the soon to come.
Friend, heaven and earth will pass away. The troubles that look monumental won’t last always. But God’s promises, everything he’s ever spoken over you will not pass away. It won’t fade. It won’t die, but it will accomplish exactly what he intended in his heart for it to do.
So when I really thought about it, the worst case scenario wouldn’t be having my baby early.
Or him being in ICU. Or ultimately losing him—though those things would still hurt incredibly if they happened.
Really, the worst case scenario would be walking through this life on either end of happiness or tragedy without the grounding love of the Father.
How tragic, how dreadful and sad would it be to have to walk through this life—both it’s beauty and it’s debilitating difficulties—without God?
Never grabbing hold of the free gift of grace God offers me through Jesus and spend this short life alone–longing for love and purpose and hope and peace but never having it? That's the worst case scenario.
Living this life outside of the embrace of the love + goodness God freely offers me in Jesus gives me every reason to be afraid.
Because it is then that I really have no hope.
That I could be crushed. That I would be ready to quit + give up.
That I’d have to try to fight my own battles in my own strength—which is exhausting and impossible.
The greatest worst case scenario would be going another year, another month, another day, another moment not knowing we’re loved by God, and the lengths we’d go to apart from him to try to feel or know we’re loved.*
(*paraphrase of words from Kris Vallotton)
But because of God’s unwavering, unfailing character, I can have nothing to fear because I can be assured of this one thing: that thanks to Jesus, I will never know what it means to not be loved.
When you invite him into your life, you will never know what it’s like to be completely alone or abandoned.
You’ll never know what it means to be rejected + never accepted.
You’ll never know how it feels to be judged or shamed.
You’ll never know what it’s like to not experience God’s goodness + love.
“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
— Romans 8:38-39 (ESV)
So when our fears rise up, what if instead of wandering alone through its dark forests—like Alice in Wonderland trying to find her way home—what if we chose to pause, to let God in on our hearts in those moments?
What if we let go of fears hand and chose to grab hold of God’s to navigate us out of the twisted roads of worst case scenarios to show us what the root of our fears are?
He knows us better than we know ourselves.
Every layer of fear he reveals to us isn’t to shame us, but to invite us to become receivers of his love. Because his perfect love evicts fear (1 John 4:18).
The places within us that we haven’t allowed his perfect love to take root are the places where fear has. And receiving God’s love for you is the only remedy to uprooting your fears.
Friend, you don’t have to know everything to trust God.
You don’t have to understand everything to trust God.
You’ve just got to trust that he is God:
the God who’s good, no matter what...
and the God who loves you, no matter what.
Friend, whether the worst happens or not, whatever the outcome of the trials and difficulties we face, we can know this: that God is still good and he still love us.
That doesn’t change. No matter what life throws at us, no matter how we feel, no matter what anyone else has to say, he won’t fail us because he can’t.
Think of the times where you were facing a difficult situation that looked impossible, where you were sure you wouldn’t make it out...and then it actually worked out better than your fears said it would.
Has there been a time where your worst case scenario actually came true? It was probably devastating, but guess what? You’re still here!
If you were able to think of even one scenario in your life where either of those things have happened, friend your life is marked by God’s love + goodness.
And if you’re in a place of believing God has failed you, I want to ask you this: did he fail to keep every promise he’s ever spoken over you, or did he just fail to meet your expectations of how you think things should’ve happened?
At the end of the day, I pray you won’t go another second without being convinced that you are wildly, unconditionally and relentlessly loved by a good, good Father.
And that whatever you’re facing today or will face tomorrow, if the rains come pouring down, and the floodwaters rise, and the winds bellow + blow, you will remain standing, because you're rooted + grounded in Love.