Midweek Faith Lift
July 1, 2026
“Overcoming Fear & Our Soul’s Longing”
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
June 23, 2026
There was a woman who suffered from severe, almost debilitating pain in both of her arms. She had been to many different doctors with no relief or explanation for her symptoms. She finally saw a physician who was a mind/body specialist. He often worked with imagery, using a guided visualization process to connect with the body and listen to what it has to say. As the doctor guided the woman through the process, she said that she imagined wrought iron bars clamped down on both of her arms. The doctor asked her what these bars wanted to say to her.
Though it felt odd, she asked out loud what they were there for, and what they wanted her to know. At this, she was immediately flooded with memories of her grandfather. He had been a stern man, and had died about a year before her pain began. She had taken care of him in his final years, but never felt loved by him. He was harsh and very difficult throughout her life, and she always thought it was her fault. Since his death, she hadn’t liked to think about him. Caring for him and his passing had been painful, stressful, and she had tried to put it from her mind.
But, in putting it from her mind, she had buried it in her body. After more guided processes, she came to understand the emotional pain behind the physical pain in her arms. As she worked with it and eventually resolved it, her symptoms were alleviated. She discovered that the whole process was about love. Allowing a sense of Universal Love to be laid over her relationship with her grandfather, she was healed and made whole.
"That which has quickened our souls and given us the joyous sense of freedom will work in every cell of our bodies to give them that same wonderful sense of wholeness and freedom." - Myrtle Fillmore, How to Let God Help You
Wow, what a story of healing, of fearlessness in walking through the energy of past hurts to a place in consciousness of love, healing and peace! Most of us want to escape the pain, or numb it with addictions or find just the right medicine to get rid of it! We want to “move forward” as if the past has no impact on us; we can just put it behind us. I am personally familiar with that move and it’s consequences! It takes spiritual and emotional awareness and maturity to realize that there is a healing need that calls for a different, deeper and more concentrated approach to healing and recovery. As I reflected on this story, it became clearer to me that our heroine no doubt was carrying fear, resentment, anger and more and all of this weighed on her arms like prison bars. Wow!
We are exploring what Myrtle has to say about overcoming fear and finding our soul’s longing and this story is a powerful illustration of that process and that path. She writes about overcoming fear in a very typical, direct Myrtle way! She states very clearly on p. 93 of How to Let God Help You:
Sometimes we fear that we have not the ability to do a thing we ought to do; we fear there are obstacles in the way. If there are obstacles, we have made them. God never put anything in the way of progress. When we get rid of our fears, we find that the way is clear for us to go the Lord’s way.
In these very challenging times, when hate, spite and retribution seem to be the prevailing theme, we are collectively challenged to turn within to find the strength to face our fears and walk through them together. We as a people have been forced to see what hate does to us. The reality is that it drives us apart and it is very destructive. When we carry it in our bodies, it becomes pain that we want to escape. It’s an obstacle that we have created and one we can dissolve with God’s love and grace.
When we realize that the obstacles of fear, hate, spite and retribution are all human creations, it offers hope that we can create something else in place of all that destructive energy. It gives us hope! Myrtle’s path is that of placing complete faith in the Power and Presence of God, of Love. She says “if you would overcome all your enemies and find your freedom you must be true to your one defense….God the Good.” All human darkness will ultimately fall in that light of love. “The power of darkness will vanish before it.” That is what ultimately happened to the woman in the opening story; she worked with the hurt and the emotional pain and finally, resolved it with love and the hard work of letting her feelings surface and find healthy expression.
Myrtle understood the spiritual energy of healing and the mind/body connection, and it is amazing what she knew about the psychological aspects of human behavior and development. In the chapter, “The Longing of Our Souls” Myrtle discusses at length how humans experience great unrest due to a lack of what she calls “holiness.” I would call it a lack of “wholeness.” That sense of emptiness within drives us to fill it with substances, excitement, money, addictions, unhealthy relationships and myriad distractions. It is a wholeness within that tells us that we matter, it matters that we are on this earth at this time. That emptiness comes from the accumulated hurts and emotional scars that we have not yet brought to light and healed in love. We are longing for wholeness, for that sense of love and strength that is so solid no one or no thing can disturb the calm peace of our soul.
When we don’t have that, we constantly seek substitutions and develop what she calls “bad habits.” She cautions to “drop out of your mind the idea that a bad habit is a terrible thing….(otherwise) you keep giving it as much or more power than you allow the Christ.” (p.97) That is a really powerful insight into our human patterns of belief. Bad habits are not a moral failing, they are a failure to find what is truly nourishing to our mind/body/souls. And the solution she suggests as the only lasting and powerful remedy is to become aware of and embrace that which is greater than we are, to embrace God, Spirit, Love. This sound a lot like the first step of recovery in all 12 -Step Programs: “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” The root word for sanity is sanos which means wholeness.
This healing process is not easy, but it is truly the only way. It is the path of Spirit, the path out of fear, self-loathing and self-hatred into the light of love and self-acceptance. It is what God wants for all of us, as it says in Scripture:
"Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, just as it is well with your soul. I have no greater joy than this, to hear that my children are walking in the truth." - 3 John 1:2-4
This statement in the letters from John reminds us that God’s will for us, for all of us, is good and only good. Pause and realize how powerful that statement is! When we begin to look at our individual lives and our collective, shared lives from that vantage point, it changes our perspective and our perceptions. We can embrace hope as we embrace one another.
This week in Richard Rohr’s June 23, 2026 blog “Hope Takes Practice” he features the voice of Grammy and award winning Jon Batiste, the musician/artist who writes this:
I’ve started to learn that hope transcends the physical. Hope is the language of the invisible. It transcends circumstances because it transcends physicality. It’s spiritual. It’s the language of the invisible realm, which is just as real, if not more real, than the things we can see and touch. Hope is the deep inner knowing that comes from building that [foundation]. That’s why I like to say that hope is like a contact sport. You work on it. You get better at it. My house could be flooded, and the roof could be on fire, and still, there’s a sense of hope I can have. I’m going to stay in that boat.
This isn’t easy all the time, but it’s a choice that—once we make it and we root ourselves in the deepest, most authentic place in our life, however we arrived there—then we can truly live that out. We can build on that, and it compounds, no matter what the circumstances surrounding us are, no matter what they could be, and whether we have control of them or not.
We have created the circumstances of our lives and with the Power and Presence of Love, of Spirit we can co-create the way of peace that truly works for all because we are all in this boat, on this planet together even if we don’t want to see it or realize it.
I leave you today with the ancient Hindu wisdom of the Upanishads that recognizes how powerfully we are all interconnected:
“They who see all beings in themselves, and themselves in all beings, lose all fear. When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him? The Spirit filled all with his radiance. He is the supreme seer and thinker, immanent and transcendent. He placed all things in the path of Eternity.” - The Upanishads
May it be so…
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb