The Fear of Good
He wrote two pages about his future as a professional baseball star. But ever since he was cut from a small town AA team in his early twenties, Sammy has mostly called the streets, or whatever worn out sleeping bag he happens to be carrying that day, his home.
Born to a single mother, Sammy saw men come and go from his life and never knew his father. He’s now thin from wandering and eating poorly most of his life. His tan and wrinkled skin with his unkempt, greying beard make him look at least a decade older than the 50 years he claims. I asked Sammy why he’s homeless and he gave me some insight into his life:
“I used to dream about hitting balls for the Red Sox. I dreamed about the big white centennial I’d live in and how I’d eat out nice every night. The first time I went to a restaurant, I was 17 years old. So I wanted nice things for myself.
“Well, I was on my way, playing AA ball and I wasn’t rich, but I was a hell of a lot more rich than I’d ever been up to that point. After dinner one night, I remember it cost $20 and that was a lot in those days. I stepped outside the restaurant and two scrawny old women passed me by, all dressed in rags and pushing a shopping cart with everything they owned piled up in it. They looked at me like, well, like I was just another silver spoon-fed boy from the upper side of town.
“I was cut from the team not long after that and no one has ever looked at me that way since. I think that’s why I’m on the streets. Ever since those ladies looked at me that way, I lost my drive to get rich.”
Money can bring more problems than it solves, yet most people would rather have a little more than a little less.
From the outside looking in, it seems reasonable to wonder why anyone would chose Sammy’s lifestyle for fear of a few random people’s judgment—an unfair judgment at that.
That’s how fears are. They often don’t make sense to anyone but the person who feels that fear himself. Fear is often irrational, like when we fear a thing that most people tend to desire. It’s like the giant circuit board inside us got its wires crossed, wires that are now causing us to choose something less in exchange for giving up something better. We often let fear hold us back from good things in life and I think it starts with overestimating the power fear has.
Here are eight characteristics of fear that might help us shed some light on how to beat it in our own lives:
Fear tends to become a much bigger deal than it really is.
If we were able to step outside ourselves and see our fear as someone else does, we might agree that our biggest fears are perhaps laughably small. In our own minds, fear becomes a fire-breathing dragon, something that pins us to the wall and cages us in and makes us shiver and sweat. But to everyone else, our big fear is just a little kitten, a kitten we are allowing to cage us in. The kitten pretends it’s a dragon and we eagerly play along.
We always overestimate the strength fear has over us. We tell ourselves how weak we are and how big our fear is and we worry about the consequences of standing up for ourselves. If we could see our fear like everyone else does, we’d realize that all this time we’ve been talking ourselves into submission. We’d see that all we ever needed to do was step over that little kitten and walk right out of the dungeon we’ve built for ourselves.
Most fears are created by our mind. These fears can be also be destroyed by our mind.
We choose to give our fear power over us. And no one in this world, not a loving spouse or child or parent or friend can do anything about this fear, either to make it stronger or weaker, without our consent. Of course there are many real fears that are not in the mind, such as an abusive spouse. Those fears must be dealt with differently, namely by locking them up in the backseat of a police car. But fears born of the mind, like the fear of success or the fear of love or the fear of being a good parent, these are fears that can disappear with the focused and persistent power of choice. A fear of the mind could hypothetically evaporate in the blink of an eye if we could summon the necessary strength. In the real world, though, most of these fears are far too ingrained in us to go so easily. We’ve often been walking with them a long time, feeding them too richly, allowing them to weave their scales into our psyche. These fears are tenacious, but the mind has the power to unweave them, just as it had the power to weave them there in the first place.
Other people’s fears seem strange to us, just like our fears seem strange to them.
Since each of us tends to get our wires crossed in a slightly different pattern, it’s hard to understand why someone might be fearful of something that we would actually like to have. Some people fear losing weight while millions of others would very much like to lose twenty pounds. Some people fear entertaining friends while others get great joy out of having a party. This is the oddity of fears. To the person feeling them, the fear is the most reasonable thing in the world. It’s all they know and they’re frustrated when others don’t get it. All the while, everyone else is wringing their hands trying to get this person to see the world as they do.
Fear loves the dark.
What is the first thing an abuser tells his victim? “Don’t say a word about this to anyone, or else…” Fear is a cunning abuser and the sad part is that all of this fear is going on inside our own heads. There is nothing fear loves more than suffering in silence, but just speaking up is frightening. Admitting our fears makes us feel weak. We worry people will judge us. We worry people will think we’re crazy. But most of all, we’re so comfortable with our fears that we don’t want anyone to take them away from us. We’ve allowed our fear to become such an important part of our identity we can’t imagine ourselves without it anymore. Fear knows this and makes sure we don’t bring it into the light, in part because fear knows that the light will reveal it for the harmless kitten that it really is.
Fear is from Satan.
Where is it written that God is a God of fear? Did God become man and die for our sins so we could enslave ourselves to fear? No, fear is perhaps our enemy’s greatest weapon. Satan steps up close, whispers self-hate in our ear and slides his poison-tipped dagger up into our side. He does it all so subtly that nobody else can see what’s really going on and we feel alone. It’s clearly a wartime tactic—what derails us from God’s plan more surely than fear?
Fear becomes more aggressive when we try to do something that matters.
Fear has one goal: to render us into a useless pile of mashed potatoes. Fear hates when we contribute to our world or when we make a difference for another human being. The more we try to do, and the bigger a difference we attempt to make, the more fear will try to sabotage us. The closer we get to making that difference, the more aggressive fear will become with us.
Fear’s greatest weapon is indecision and inaction.
Fear wins when we do nothing and the easiest way to make sure we do nothing is by getting us to delay. It’s a lot easier to get us to wait one more day than to get us to quit entirely. Fear loves the idea of doing something tomorrow that could be done today, because every day we wait we get one day closer to never.
Fear argues both sides of an issue.
One minute our fears tell us we’re too fat. The next, we’re too skinny. Sometimes our fears tell us we’ll never succeed. Then we’re worried about what people will think if we do in fact succeed. Fear is like this. It doesn’t just stay on one side of the issue. Like a skillful war tactician, fear will attack us from every possible position, rotating to keep us confused and submissive.
So how do we fight fear?
Share our fears with trusted friends and keep talking about them until they’re gone forever.
In addition to sharing our fears, we should write down what our fears are. This will help us come up with arguments to use against the fear (see #4 below) and keep us accountable and honest with ourselves about the fears that we face.
Don’t ever put off anything that we can do now. It doesn’t matter how small the step is, take action right now. That might mean eating one less bite of food or writing one more paragraph. Whatever it is, don’t put it off one more minute.
Memorize and recite statements of strength that are in direct contradiction to our fears. These can be verses of the Bible or our own prose. We need to have these handy so we can recite them, possibly out loud, whenever the fear pops up.
God wants us to bring our fears to him. Meditate on God’s goodness and trust him to bring about his plan in your life despite your fears, inadequacies and lacking.
Sammy isn’t the only person in this world who has allowed fear to control and distort his life. All of us are living a lesser life than we are capable of, on some level, because of fear. But we don’t have to accept this as our only possible reality. We can overcome our greatest and most powerful fears and live the life God would love for us to experience by choosing His path. Somewhere along the way, we’ve allowed a wire to get crossed in our heads that makes us fear something that should be good for us. We must trade our fear of good for a healthy fear of God.
"The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid" - Psalm 118:6, NIV
