“In and then Out.”

H,

It is funny how you always tell me: “do not be afraid.” I always immediately think: “of what?” I never feel I am afraid of anything but that is mostly because I am afraid of everything. Well, not everything, most things. I have always had this feeling that the sky is about to fall. Not only that but I know the specific reason why it is about to fall. This fear, this idea that the future most hold only bad things and the present will have no solution, is at the root of all my faux predictions about why my world is about to end. I should be told to curb the fear. I have a lot of it.

The thing about fear is that some of it is actually true. There is a fear of things that might happen and then they do. We are crushed by an expected end. The idea, however, of the Christian worldview is that no fear is fatal if we live in the light of God. The expected thing coming to pass is not the end of the story. It is a line, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. The book is long and never ending. We have to put our fear in the context of the eternal nature of the sacred life. It is not that we will not see the outcome, it is that we will see way beyond that.

There has to be an inner life of faith to speak to the outer feeling of fear. Fear makes us inert. Faith makes us plausible, proactive. The only cure to crippling fear is a faith in something above fear. To the Christian this is in God, in that view of history and in the picture painted of the world to come. All things will resolve in the sacred curve of time into reality.

This is not an easy view to take. It is not a stand that living on earth will help you get better at. It is not enough to take the easy placebo of positive thinking couched as faith. It is an invitation to find real faith in the arms of your father. Not to be fake but forthright. Not to put on a smile but perhaps to start with tears and on your knees. To be open to the inner life of God is the best way to face the outer world. No one will do this perfectly. There will be ups and downs. It will take a minute. Yet like all real cures it is not a one-time event but the trajectory of a life lived in faith.