Fear is dominated by personal experience and finds it nearly impossible to benefit from other sources of information, no matter how reliable and useful those sources are. Despite your intellect telling you it is idiotic, you are therefore likely to end up feeling ill at ease about harmless snakes, legless lizards, eels and so on, just because of a bad experience with a certain snake.

This is also how it is with our feelings toward God. Having been let down and deeply hurt by humans – especially during our formative years – causes our fear to spread from certain unscrupulous people all the way to God himself. This fear persists despite our intellect telling us that God is not subject to human failings.

Just as it is possible, but far from easy, for someone terrified of snakes to overcome an irrational fear of harmless snakes, so it is possible, but far from easy, to overcome the groundless fear that God might be as unreliable as other key people in our lives.

Taken from Fear: Help & Cure

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