What are the sources of anxiety, stress, and fear you experience in your life? Popular Catholic speaker and author Sonja Corbitt believes that these often-paralyzing emotions are the direct result of our everyday battles against sin and temptation.

In her new book Fearless, Corbitt equips us with the spiritual tools we need to restore our spiritual well-being. She talked with Ave Maria Press about the goals of the book.

Ave Maria Press: How is Fearless different from Unleashed?

Sonja Corbitt: The process of allowing the Holy Spirit to unleash us from toxic relationships, self-medicating and other bad habits, repeating circumstances, and overwhelming desires begins painfully. We assume things are going to get better right away since we’re truly trying to follow God, but instead they seem to get worse! Why is that?

That’s when we become fearful and are tempted to all sorts of giving up and acting out and anxiety and depression. Fearless shines the light of God’s Word on our discouragement and anxiety in the process of following God and helps dissipate the fear of it.

Unleashed helps us identify where we’re stuck in patterns. Fearless offers tools for the battles we are facing and will face in following God out of our destructive patterns, especially in our time in history.

Ave: What’s the most important thing you want readers to come away with after reading Fearless?

Corbitt: Freedom from fear through a more complete abandonment to God. I show my readers how to risk big, and pray they do, that they leap the chasm of fear straight into His arms.

Ave: Explain what “spiritual warfare” means in the context of our everyday lives. It seems like a frightening concept.

Corbitt: Fear is a deficit of love. C. S. Lewis said we are always tempted simultaneously in opposite extremes. We can be afraid of spiritual warfare, or we can deny it completely. At its most basic, biblical spiritual warfare is fighting fear, because fear motivates sin. God, ourselves, the other—we sin against those we fear; we do not sin against those we truly love. Satan’s only real power is deceiving us into sin. And even in sin, there is no place dark enough that the Light of the World cannot penetrate. Spiritual warfare, then, is discerning and fighting temptation with the Word of God. In Fearless, I arm my readers to the hilt with truth so they can grow out of fear into a deeper love and awareness.

Ave: If someone has not been a regular reader of the Bible but wants to start, what’s a good way to begin?

Corbitt: The saints tell us we should always begin with daily lectio divina in the daily readings of the Church. If there is little time, just read, meditate, pray, and rest in the Gospel. But there’s more on that in the book!