Fear Exposed

What is Fear?  Fear meets us in many different forms and across the scope of a diversity of circumstances.  The various expressions of human fear are manifold.  I once met a person with the fear of dust.  Dust!  What’s so scary about dust?  Encounters such as this have caused me to wonder, if fear really is this random and subjective.  Is there any common aspect present in human fear?  

It happened not long after I earned my driver’s license.  Growing up in north eastern Pennsylvania, I was accustomed to harsh winters and slick roads.  In fact, I, like many my age, learned how to transform hazardous winter driving into a theme park ride.  We called it “donuts”.  All you needed was a controlled environment, say an empty parking lot, with enough space to allow for maximum spinning enjoyment.  Oh yeah, you also need to find the place that had failed to plow or put salt down.  Salt was always a friction producing killjoy.  Working at a steakhouse at the time, I had the ultimate location.  Behind the restaurant was a large, ice-laced, snow-covered parking lot of excitement.  Oh the hours of sliding fun we would have, cars and trucks slipping across the icy pavement.  However, one morning following just such an evening, as I was driving to work, something unexpected happened, I began to slide.  There was nothing different about this sliding from what I had experienced the night before.  All of the scientific laws of friction, or the lack of it, were aptly applied.  Yet for some reason, the very same action which brought jovial laughter, now ushered in a torrent of fear?  What changed?  The environment.  Now I was sliding in the middle of a four lane road, cars whizzing by, and electric poles perilously positioned everywhere.  I was not afraid of sliding on ice, I proved that the night before.  I like every human being was afraid of what I lacked the power to control.  

You see, fear is the realization that I have needs that I cannot meet.  We are never afraid of the dark, we are afraid of what we cannot see, and thereby control.  We are never afraid of poverty, but of the reality that I cannot feed or cloth myself as and when I wish.  We are not afraid of heights, but of an unfamiliar setting in which we are unsure how to proceed.  The lack of control, this is fear in a nutshell.  

What Perpetuates Fear?  Instability.  Humans require a large measure of predictability in life.  However, life often does not cooperate.  I recall the debate between Bill Nye the science guy and Ken Ham (the 7 Day guy).  As I listened, I was intrigued by Bill Nye’s religious insistence on the necessity of predictability.  He doggedly argued that any real science must included a large measure of predictability.  But why?  Because the control that predicability provides vanquishes fear.  

What Destroys Fear?  Control.  “How do I tame the world, make it predictable, control it?”  This has been the quest of every human since the fall.  It began with Eve.  The serpent did not need to convince her that God was passé, he merely needed to plant a seed of fear in her heart.  He reminded her of her needs and suggested that God may not be the most reliable supplier of them.  It was all down hill from there.  Eve came unglued.  She was afraid because she started down the wrong direction of life’s greatest question, “who is your God?”  The ancient world understood this question well.  If Yahweh was God, then he was indeed in control and could be trusted — fear vanquished.  However, if Yahweh was not God, then I must re-imagine a world in which I am in control, and life would become an exhausting struggle in which I must continually convince myself of the validity of my false world.  As long as I am successful, I can hold fear at bay, but if I fail, fear will flood my life.   

The real question of your greatest fears are not, how can I overcome them, but who is the God of them?  Can God be trusted?  If God good?  Can God really meet my needs?  If my answer is yes, then the greeting oft offered by Jesus “fear not” provides me warmth and peace.  On the other hand, if my answer is no, then fear will dominate my life, and how great that fear will be.  

In the final analysis, the science guy was wrong, I don’t need to be able to predict the road ahead, and in truth I can’t; I simply need to know and trust the One who can.