Joy Beyond the Circumstances: Island of Fear Not

by Kathi Smith
Jan/Feb/Mar 2013

Just eight weeks ago on a Wednesday morning, I was getting prayer from a woman when she softly said, "I know this sounds random, but I think I heard the Lord say that on your thirtieth wedding anniversary, you are going to have a big celebration." I then laughed — I was glad it wasn't a prophetic word from the Lord such as, "Hey, God has this ark He wants you to build!" Nevertheless, I wrote down her words that night, wondering if the prayer minister had been tuned in to God when she had prayed for me.

Several days later my husband and I went away to Cumberland Island for a week, and I put the prophetic words out of my mind. While there, I received a phone call from my doctor's assistant to discuss the results of a pathology report from what was supposed to have been a routine biopsy. "You have breast cancer," she said gently and somewhat timidly, expecting the normal reaction.

My first response — not my second, third or fourth, but my first — was to smile, look up into the sky and say, "Oh, that's why I got the word about the thirtieth wedding anniversary!" You see, my thirtieth wedding anniversary is not until five years from now. No worries and not one ounce of fear accompanied the cancer diagnosis. The doctor's assistant was shocked by my lack of negativity and wanted to make sure that I had heard her words correctly. I had indeed understood her and yet was basking in the wonderful comfort of the Lord's assurance He had given me the week before. I also did not know that the medical community refers to "five–year survival probabilities" when grading cancer, but I had already been given a 100% survival guarantee by the prophetic word from the Lord — before I even had a diagnosis!

I have continued to talk about it and tell people, "I am in this crazy place with God, kind of like an other–worldly realm. It is as though I'm walking on water, but it is a permanent state." I have begun to describe this wonderful place as "the Island of Fear Not." I propose that God has made this Island of Fear Not available to everyone, and He wants us to live in this "other–worldly" place all the time. Why would angels in the Bible continually say, "Fear not!" if it weren't a possibility? Jesus invited people to walk on water with Him. He multiplied food during shortages and encouraged His friends to do the same. He brought healing to many, some of whom didn't even ask for His help. What if Jesus' words and actions are not merely history, but can actually happen today? What if we started to act upon these expectations and then started to see them come to fruition?

I happen to be living in this supernatural dimension right now. I believe and have seen for myself that His promises are indeed truths for today and not just wishful thinking. Instead of accepting all the limitations the doctors have put on me, I have posed the "what if" questions to my life, and they have led to living in His truths. For the pathology report that came back cancer "positive," I asked friends to pray that it was reversed in the next test. I had even delayed a major surgery so that I could go on a pre–planned trip to Belgium to teach healing prayer. At this conference I invited the audience to join me on the Island of Fear Not. The result: many people received inner healing that night from lifelong fears, sickness and traumas. I was also incredibly blessed to pray in a group for a young paraplegic man confined to a wheelchair. We experienced God's miracles as he first received feeling in his legs, then proceeded to move his legs for the first time in his life, and finally, to the awe and wonder of the entire group, he was able to stand up and take his first twenty or so steps. There was no fear that night in that room in Belgium. So God does offer power and healing, and they are available today. "Ask and it will be given to you." (Matthew 7:7)

My Story

If healings were measured in miles, I have already traveled a lifetime's distance. I have received healing from multiple life–altering conditions: PTSD; clinical depression and rampant fear caused by years of living in war conditions and from being abducted while living in Lebanon; a debilitating viral auto immune disorder that left me unable to walk; and from childhood abuse that occurred outside of my home. I had so much fear in my life that it actually controlled me. Throughout my youth "scaredy–cat" and "worry–wart" were normal nicknames for me, and nightmares were the norm. I was very sensitive, and my fear sensors worked only too well and were often on high alert, so fearful thinking and negative expectations hijacked my being. Fear became my co–pilot. At one point, the sound of a toilet flushing would send me into a full panic attack.

"For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." (Romans 7:15) When I became a Christian, I could relate so well to Paul's struggle. I could not get rid of fear! I renounced any agreement with fear; I gave it to Jesus again and again. I felt guilty all the time, and I even got anxious about trying not to be anxious. Yet, fear did not leave nor abandon me.

But then twelve years ago when I ended up in a wheelchair with viral arthritis, I started to receive inner healing from the traumas of my childhood. As I received inner healing, the physical healing followed. I finally started to see the light at the end of the tunnel! I even dreamed about being fear free, and started to look forward to "the other side of this mountain." Over the past twelve years, the Lord has led me out of the tunnel of panic, over the mountain of negative expectations and then, over the past two years, across seas of fear to the Island of Fear Not.

Two years ago, the Lord gave me a vision. I am not one to shout out "God gave me a vision!" so please know that I share this with an incredible sense of humility. I still get teary–eyed thinking that my Jesus would present Himself to me in this way:

The Vision

I am walking in front of Niagara Falls with Jesus. He turns to me, smiles, and asks, "What do you think, Kathi?"

I smile back at Him because I know He has a lesson for me. If anyone knows me, I am often impatient and want the bottom line, so of course my response is, "What is it you want to teach me, Jesus?"

He chuckles at my inability to just be and my "need to know." He asks me, "What do you see out there?"

My answer: "Beauty, majesty, power, strength?" I end my statement as a question. He smiles. He knows that I am wondering if my opinion is compliant. I am grading my own answer, wanting to please, but also wanting to be free to answer spontaneously. I have a hard time not responding critically. A life full of fear has shaped me to evoke judgmental responses, which I have pretended to label as discernment.

Jesus looks at me and smiles, nodding in agreement. He then takes His hand and swipes Niagara Falls away — like an iphone swipe — to a different screen. The scene is the same, but the actual falls have disappeared. In their place are the craggy, muddy, ugly, brown sides of a rock face that have no beauty, no majesty, no power, nor any strength. Superimposed on top of the absent falls is a gigantic faucet. The faucet is emitting a steady drip of enormous water droplets. We see and hear the constant dripping of the leaky faucet. I feel an overwhelming sense of confusion at this transformed scene. A frown spreads across my brow. "What are you trying to teach me?" I ask.

He smiles, and His smile soaks right into me as liquid love. "This," He says above the thunderous sound as He swipes the scene back to the original Niagara Falls, "This is my power in you without fear. And this," He says as he once again sweeps away an invisible heavy curtain with his extended arm, "is my power in you with fear." Again I am standing in awe as the scene changes back to the drippy faucet overhanging ugly barren cliffs with wet clumpy mud.

I am stunned. With astonishing visual effects, His message to me has broken into the core of my being and has clamped itself onto my heart. I hear my heart pounding, and then I realize I am in my bed and that this was a vision, similar to a dream, but I was awake the entire time. I swallow a lump in my throat and enter into prayer. "Lord, take away whatever fear is left in me; I want Niagara and I want You. I don't want the deficient drippy faucet. I give you permission to do whatever it takes to get me to Niagara."

Before that vision, I had tried again and again to put down fear, cast out fear, get prayer for fear, envision fear as an entity to hand over. Inner healing had been enormous in unpeeling fear's vice–like grip and had changed a lifelong mindset of panic and negative expectations. But fear itself had somehow remained. The vision gave me assurance that a place existed in which fear was absent.

As this new vision soaked in and permeated my senses over time, I began to come often to the Lord with it, asking Him about it. I told Him I didn't want to worship the fear–free life or put it on a pedestal, but I also didn't have clear direction on how to attain that place that He had revealed to me in the vision. I did a word study on fear in the Bible, and one verse in particular spoke very loudly to me. "Perfect love casts out all fear," (I John 4:18) rang like a reverberating gong. If He is love, then inviting His presence was sure to help. I found myself invoking "Perfect Love" whenever fear came, and when this became a habit, I had to laugh when I realized I was actually calling on Jesus Himself. Perfect Love is just one of the many characteristics of His personality — it's a strong and solid presence — a "Jesus with skin on" presence!!

As I write I am overflowing with joy, as I think about another recent picture that the Lord gave to me as confirmation to the truth that He revealed to me in my "Niagara vision." On the way to Belgium, I saw a picture of gorgeous clouds outside the window of the airplane. There was a layer of cottonballish clouds appearing as ground cover with another set of higher clouds above that were bigger and more full, appearing as another sky. I took a picture of them with my iphone. When I looked at the picture, I did a double–take. I looked back to the view outside the window, but my eyes couldn't see what had appeared on my iphone. In the picture, as though moving like a waterfall from the higher clouds was a rainbow — the symbol of God's covenant — looking like Niagara in the sky flowing down to the earth.

I am finally experiencing the power of God without fear, the Niagara that God has given me and offers each of us. I pray that all of you who are looking to shed fear might receive God's Niagara for yourselves, in Jesus' name:"Do not be anxious about anything…" (Philippians 4:6).

Kathi Smith is the Senior Editor of Healing Line and an active CHM prayer minister.