The Secret to Not Being Scared

tuck this in your back pocket for election day, halloween, what have you

Photo by Rithika Gopal on Unsplash

I used to be scared when I left the house—scared that it would burn to ash while we were eating at a restaurant, scared that the wind would blow a door open and our dog would run away and get hit.

I kid you not: whenever we pulled back onto our own road again, I would scan the pavement and the ditches for black and white fur, half-certain that we’d find Pablo there instead of on the couch, sleeping.

Once, a couple days before we had planned a weeklong getaway in San Diego with friends, I experienced stomach pains so severe I thought my appendix had burst. I crawled to the bathroom because I couldn’t stand, then spluttered in the midnight darkness for Ethan. I think you need to drive me to the ER, I’d managed to croak. Something is very, very wrong. Hours later, under sterile fluorescent lights, the doctor scratched his head and showed me the tests that said I was perfectly fine. I didn’t know then that fear manifests itself in our physical bodies; I didn’t understand that my terror of flying and bombings and impending disaster could seep out of my brain and contort my flesh too.

The freight train would rumble past our house and I would feel dread take hold of my molars and clench them shut. A plane would fly overhead and I braced myself for explosion. Everything shook me and rattled me and I? I was a child’s sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic. If there was ever one to fit the bill for the description “O afflicted one, storm-tossed and not comforted,”¹ it was me.

Don’t ask me to explain my fear—I can’t. That’s the slippery thing about fear: it’s fluid, difficult to pin down. And it absorbs us into its waters and takes us wherever it will. Wherever it wills. When we’re drowning in it, there’s no sense speaking to the rational brain, for she has gone into hiding or haywire and it’s hopeless to appeal to her. I assure you she’s not available for interviews.

I feel the undercurrent of fear pulsating in the bones of our nation right now.

There’s a general sense of weariness, of jumpiness. Of bracing for the worst. I recognize a state of dread when I see it, of course, because I spent a solid decade bobbing in its waters and trying not to take too much into my lungs.

I have wanted to address this fear—to say something that will help—but I have held back lest I come out sounding like an air-headed Pollyanna. I have hesitated in the face of imagined cynics who will scoff at such whisperings as hope or relief. For that reason my tongue has stayed stuck to the roof of my mouth, growing stale there.

But I have just remembered that if the rational mind vacates the premises when fear takes up residence, smart or well-planned words aren’t the medicine here, anyway. It is an appeal to the gut, to the spirit, to the heart—to all those gorgeous organs and entities that, for whatever reason, we’ve stopped trusting in the name of “logic.”

And so my gut appeals to yours. It cries out and says, “There used to be knots here, but now there is gravel. There is a toughness where there used to be turbulence.”

And my spirit shakes your spirit and says, “Wake up! There is light all around you. Can’t you sense it filtering through the eyelids of your soul?” Like in a nightmare when you can rouse your own sleeping subconscious to come back into the realm of reality, you can cry out “God, Father! Rouse me to the reality of light when all I can see is dark!” and fellow-spirit, I tell you [I am nearly bold enough to promise you]: he will.

And my heart. It holds your heart (which has already trembled for what feels like ten eternities, yes?) and it whispers, “I don’t have a formula for overcoming fear. But I know that it’s possible because once I was as scared as you are now, but today there is a lovely openness amongst my ribs that holds me afloat. I bob gently within, even when the world rages without.”

This is my testimony. This is how I know that God is real. Because the only way I could go from being that scared to feeling this sense of peace is that Someone more powerful than all of Fear’s ragings must have LOVED me here. 1 John 4:18 says that “…perfect love drives out fear.” And it is my experience that this is true.

I sense that there are no witty words or measures of logic which will be able to explain this phenomenon, but I also believe that logic can only take us so far, and that being willing to surrender to the mystery is essential to staying afloat—and so I say again: if your gut and spirit and heart are longing for more than what you can see of this terrifying world—if you sense a supernatural light trying to filter through—open your eyes. Dive into Love, and watch how it keeps you afloat.

1. Isaiah 54:11