Grace and peace to you
The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is: “Be not be afraid!” It is most often repeated because it is most often broken. Furthermore it is most often repeated because fear is the source of so many other commandments being broken. Which ones? Everyone that has to do with loving because fear casts out love.
Now obviously there is fear that is healthy. The fear that makes us look left and right and left again before crossing the road. This act of caution keeps us alive and it is highly developed within us. However when fear is internalised preventing us from exploring the people we were divinely created to be then our lives become severely impoverished and God must grieve our loss of abundant life.
Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame, has just written a book called: Big Magic – Creative Living Beyond Fear.
She says fear is boring:
Around the age of fifteen, I somehow figured out that my fear had no variety to it, no depth, no substance, no texture. I noticed that my fear never changed, never delighted, never offered a surprise twist or an unexpected ending. My fear was a song with only one note – only one word, actually – and that word was “STOP!” My fear never had anything more interesting or subtle to offer than that one emphatic word, repeated at full volume on an endless loop: “STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP!” Which means that my fear always made predictably boring decisions…
I also realised that my fear was boring because it was identical to everyone else’s fear. I figured out that everyone’s song of fear has exactly that same tedious lyric: “STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP!” True the volume may vary from person to person, but the song itself never changes, because all of us humans were equipped with the same basic fear package when we were being knitted in our mothers’ wombs. And not just humans: If you pass your hand over a petri dish containing a tadpole, the tadpole will flinch beneath your shadow. That tadpole cannot write poetry, and it cannot sing, and it will never know love or jealousy or triumph, and it has a brain the size of a punctuation mark, but it damn sure knows how to be afraid of the unknown. …. So do we all. But there is nothing particularly compelling about that. Do you see what I mean? You don’t get any special credit, is what I’m saying, for knowing how to be afraid of the unknown … For the entirety of my young and skittish life, I had fixated upon my fear as if it were the most interesting thing about me, when actually it was the most mundane. In fact, my fear was probably the only 100 percent mundane thing about me. I had creativity within me that was original; I had a personality within me that was original; I had dreams and perspectives and aspirations within me that were original. But my fear was not original in the least. My fear wasn’t some kind of rare artisanal object; it was just a mass-produced item, available on the shelves of any generic box store. And that’s the thing I wanted to build my entire identity around? The most boring instinct I possessed? The panic reflex of my dumbest inner tadpole? No.
Be not be afraid …
Alan
