Why Does Everything Depend on You?
why believing in God's protection isn't the same as living like you're protected
woma
Why does everything feel like it depends on you?
Because if no one is coming, it does.
But living like everything depends on you is exhausting. It turns every problem into a predator, and you into its prey. It’s hard work being hunted all day long, existing at the bottom of the food chain.
They say the early bird gets the worm; fear says the most prepared gets spared.
So you prepare. You prepare it all: the day, the week, the month, your life, their life, the nation’s life. You monitor, research, rehearse, worry, running every possible future through the anxious maze of your mind, before it has a chance to surprise you.
If suffering is inevitable, you want to meet it at the door with a fully developed contingency plan and a rape whistle.
No wonder you're exhausted.
After enough years of living this way, fear stops feeling like something you experience and starts feeling like what you are:
Kingdom: Animalia.
Phylum: Anxious.
Class: Vigilant.
Order: Hyperalert.
Species: Prey.
But the Bible never describes believers as prey. Sure, we’re sheep, but we’re sheep with a Shepherd. We’re called children, but we’re children with a Father.
The problem isn’t that we’ve forgotten who we are; it’s that we’ve been rehearsing a different story in which every contingency plan tells us, “It’s all on you.” Every anxious rehearsal declares, “No one is coming.” And if everything depends on you, then you’re on your own. And if you’re on your own, you’re going to live like prey.
So what’s the answer? It isn’t pretending predators don’t exist.
No. Because cancer exists. Betrayal exists. Alzheimer’s, loss, and death exist. The Bible has never asked us to deny that predators roam this world.
What it does ask you to deny is that you face any of it alone. You’ve never been prey abandoned in the wilderness. You’ve always been sheep with a Shepherd, even when you forgot He was there.
The Bible never promises the absence of predators, only the presence of God. After all, Daniel had lions. Moses had Pharaoh. Paul had prisons. But none of them faced those predators alone.
Only Jesus did.
Our Shepherd entered abandonment itself so His sheep would never have to walk through this wilderness alone.
Still fear tries to convince us that, “No one is coming.” But the gospel says Someone already came.
And once you believe that, it's hard to keep thinking of yourself as prey.