We miss out on too many opportunities for greater joy by being fearful. We fear that our attempts at finding greater joy will fail, leading to pain and suffering. If you are afraid of failure, you won’t try: “The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets.” (Proverbs 22:13)
The root cause of fear paralysis is a misunderstanding of how things work. God doesn’t promise you that everything you try will work. What he does promise is that if you try everything you can, enough of what you try will work to make the effort worthwhile. God doesn’t need you to be successful at everything you try, but he does need you to try enough things with enough effort that he can work through some of them to bring about great things.
God gives us as much as he can without overcoming us. The more we trust in him, the less we will fear, and the more we can endure without being overcome.
The amount of peace and joy you have in your life is not a function of luck. It is a function of how many times you are willing to fail and still try again. The happiest people are not those who find themselves in externally easier circumstances. Rather, they are the people who relentlessly searched for more and more happiness in spite of a mountain of failures. They are never satisfied with what they’ve already found. They always risk it all again and again in the search for more.
The happiest people realize that there is no failure so large that it can cut them off from eventually encountering all the joy God has to give:
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8)
If we truly believe him, we will fear nothing. If we truly believe him, we will leap into enough things with enough intensity that we will not miss out on opportunities he intends to use to help us receive all that he has.