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I may not know what you’re going through, but I know fear has been knocking on the door of your heart and threatening to overwhelm your mind. Fear renders us incapable of taking the next steps of faith. Fear leaves us stuck. Fear keeps us in darkness. Fear robs us of the opportunity to see God’s faithful hand at work right here in our situation.Fear makes us say no. Fear makes us shut down. Fear makes us tell stories in our head that grow bigger and bigger while our ability to do anything about the situation seems to grow smaller and smaller.But that fear you feel does not come from God. 2 Timothy Where does this fear come from, my friend?God has been preparing your heart to serve him. He has been aligning your opportunity to grow in faith and step into a greater calling on your life. But before you step and before you serve, you’re going to have to tell that fear that it will not keep you from taking positive actions again today. That fear will not orchestrate your thoughts and create the stories in your mind again today. That fear will not overwhelm you, sideline you, keep you in bed, detour you, or discourage you.Remember, it’s not that we have no fear, it’s that we tell fear NO. You will still have fear in hard times, but honey, in these hard times you can’t let fear have you. You can’t operate from a place of fear. When we come from a place of fear, we become control freaks who suck the life out of everything and everyone, or we walk down hallways of opportunities and miss the open doors aligned for us by God because we’re hyper focused on the door that closed instead.Hear God as he says to his girls today, “Do not be afraid. I am with you. I see all of this. And I can work through this. This is not the end.”Do you hear that … this is not the end. I don’t know what you’re about to give up on because it’s getting way to hard and you feel way too hopeless, but listen for God’s Spirit hit you in just the right spot and say, “This is not the end.”This is bad. This is hard. This may even be unfair. This may feel really stupid. This may be totally ridiculous. But this is not the end.Scripture tells us the story of a woman who was in desperate need, and in the middle of her desperate need, she was asked to give. How absolutely ridiculous! But let’s read the story, see God’s faithful hand in it, and apply it to our lives today.1 Kings 17: 8-16: The word of the Lord came to Elijah, “Get up, to to Zarephath and stay there. Look, I have commanded a woman who is a widow to provide for you there.”First, widows were known to be poor. In this culture, if the husband died, survival for the wife became a known struggle. For Elijah to go expecting a widow to provide for him is absurd. But he goes in obedience, trusting God.“So Elijah got up and went to Zarephath. When he arrived at the city gate, there was a widow gathering sticks.” To be out gathering sticks confirms this woman is not only poor, she is desperately poor. The land was in a famine and had a shortage of food, not a shortage of wood. Gathering sticks shows she didn’t even have what others had.