What are you afraid of?
On any given day, the list of reasons to be worried can seem overwhelming. Sickness. Debt. Loneliness. Failure. Political injustice. Death. We navigate a landscape of murky shapes and looming shadows, picking our way through the charred rubble of past losses, heartbreaks, and catastrophes. Bewildered by what we’ve encountered and unsure of what’s ahead, we tread lightly, welcoming distractions and clutching at any convenience that might temporarily keep our anxiety at bay. But the peace that these things promise is fragile. After a while, the same old anxiety comes creeping back to dog our steps. We find that we’re in fear’s stomping ground, and we’re on the run.
This summer, God’s brought some things into my path that’ve made more apparent my own struggle against fear. Of any sin, this may be the one I’m best at. I’m a habitual worrier. I worry about what other people think of me, falling into the trap of trying to win people’s approval by how I act. I worry about not measuring up – about letting God and those around me down and not doing enough to fix my mistakes. As a recent college grad, I worry about finding a new, intimate community and work that makes a difference. And as a member of a family battling chronic, degenerative illness, I worry about what health struggles my future may hold.
How do we deal with fear when it comes after us? On the one hand, fear is sometimes a very natural response to perilous surroundings. God hardwired people with fight-or-flight instincts that help us survive, and when we cross paths with an avalanche, a flaming thanksgiving dinner that got left in the oven too long, a stampede of startled buffalo, or a spider hiding in a corner (whatever size said spider may be), we’re pretty jazzed and grateful that they kick into gear. There are also physical health issues and trauma that can prompt chronic anxiety and make it much tougher to fight without medical care or counseling. As someone who has battled an anxiety disorder before, I know a bit about how painfully hard this can be. On the other hand, if we allow fear to dominate our decisions, it can be paralyzing, preventing us from experiencing all kinds of adventures that pop up in our day-to-day lives. The simple fear of looking awkward can keep us from initiating a conversation with someone, trying something new, telling people what we really think and feel, or just being willing to drop our guard and be ourselves. So when fear’s howl echoes in the darkness, when the lights around us start to dim and then go out, how do we keep the old sinking feeling from gnawing at our gut? How do we stand our ground when the ground under our feet seems to be giving way?
Over and over in the Bible, God commands people to not be afraid. My brother Josiah told me recently that it’s the most repeated command in Scripture. “Do not be afraid.” Full stop. While the command smacks up against our natural inclinations, fear is presented as something incompatible with faith. Why? Worry denies that God is present and that his plans for us are good. It refuses to believe that he will come through on his promises to protect and provide for his people. Where fear spreads, trust can’t take root. However, along with this command, God’s people are also commanded repeatedly to fear their Creator – to approach him with awe, respect, and reverence. We serve a God who continually eludes and busts through the boxes of tameness and respectability that we try to stuff him into – a God who is completely holy, completely other than we are, and frighteningly wrathful against the evil that has warped and wounded his world. We serve a God who shakes mountains and manifests his presence in blazing fire, who “has thunder in his footsteps and lightning in his fists,” as songwriter Rich Mullins once wrote.
How can these two commands be reconciled? In the Bible, we learn that the fear of God is supposed to be a response to God’s redemptive love for his people (Deuteronomy 10:12-13). We approach God with awe-filled respect when we recognize that in spite of our resistance, and even though he has every right to blast us off the face of this planet, he has chosen to extend mercy to us and love us for the long haul, for better or for worse. The same God who rattles the earth and topples kingdoms in his righteous anger became a weak and vulnerable human being, working and weeping and walking alongside us, living the true and beautiful life we couldn’t live and then dying in our place to cancel the punishment that our destructive rebellion deserved. Now, amazingly, we’re invited to address the Maker of heaven and earth as “Abba,” an intimate Hebrew term used by children to address their papa. How crazy is that?! We’re invited into a eternal relationship of intimacy with God that “casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). This is how the fear of God liberates us from all other fears. This is what John Newton meant when he wrote, “Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” When we know in our bones that the scariest being there is, the only One who judges our eternal destinies and rightly deserves to be feared, loves us deeply and is actually fighting tooth and nail for our good, all other fears lose their stranglehold on our lives. Their claws are removed. If the Creator of all things truly loves us as much as he says he does, and if he really did for us what the Bible says he did, then in the deepest sense possible we are safe, now and forever. Perhaps the best description of God’s character that I’ve ever read outside of the Bible is found in Mr. Beaver’s description of the lion Aslan to Lucy in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
In light of these realities, how do we confront fear on the ground, in the thick of the daily grind, where our faith so often gets tossed around in stormy weather? This is where I’m at, and often this adventure that I’m on feels like a long, slow, uphill slog. I’m braver than I used to be, but a lot less brave than I wish I was. Fears that I’ve wrestled with for years still haunt my tracks.
One weapon that God gives us against anxiety is prayer. “do not be anxious about anything,” writes the apostle Paul, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:6). Rather than letting our fears ricochet around in our brains until we’re spent, we’re invited to talk honestly with God about them, whether they seem earth-shattering or small and insignificant. Wild. Even though he knows our concerns and dilemmas better than we do, God still wants to hear us open up to him about them. This exhortation comes with a promise: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). The struggle may not disappear. Courage and peace may not come quickly. But the promise is there nonetheless. God will give us the peace of heart that we need to keep going. Full stop.
A second weapon against fear is remembrance. Again and again, when we’re tempted to resign ourselves to despair, we have the opportunity to remind ourselves and those around us of the great story that we’re living within – the story of the God who came near, who met us where we were at, who walked out of our town into the deepest gloom imaginable and then came back three days later with the dawn.
Telling the tale to one another, and hearing it ourselves, is a sacred and vital task.
One of my all-time favorite stories is a novel called Watership Down by Richard Adams. It’s the tale of a group of rabbits who set out from their warren, which is doomed to be bulldozed by humans for a housing development, to find a new home in the wilderness. While a story about traveling bunnies may not seem all that exciting, the book is filled with suspense, surprising twists, and hare’s-breadth escapes (pardon the pun), and it ends up being an epic adventure yarn comparable to The Lord of the Rings (Really, it’s that good. Check it out!). I recently listened to a talk on the book given by author Jeffrey Overstreet, and I’m indebted to him for the following reflections. In the book, the skittish nature of rabbits and their status as prey is the result of a curse placed upon them by the sun god Frith, in response to the wily mischief of a mythical rabbit trickster named El-ahrairah. Throughout their journey, to ward off fear and find courage as they trek through the unknown, the rabbits ask one member of their company, Dandelion, to tell them stories of El-ahrairah’s fabled adventures. In one of these stories, El-ahrairah travels to the dark realm of the fearsome black rabbit of Inle (who represents death), trying to strike a bargain so that his people can be saved from predators that have surrounded their burrows. After a painful struggle, the black rabbit tells El-ahrairah that his people have been delivered. El-ahrairah returns home to find his warren safe at last, but also discovers that a lot of time has passed and none of the rabbits there remember being rescued from their enemies. Reflecting on the experience, El-ahrairah tells the sun god Frith: “I have learned that with creatures one loves, suffering is not the only thing for which one may pity them. A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise.”
Day by day, as we’re faced with a dark and twisting landscape that tempts us to worry about the future, we can either let fear control us or rehearse to ourselves and others the story that has the power to free us from our fears, once and for all – the story of the Gift who made us safe.
Words for Wayfarers 