The Art of Fear

Fear is a loaded word.  It means a lot of things, most of which I would fail to explain even to myself.  Fear might mean a fear of failure or a fear of spiders—those are not the same.  It might mean a fear of embarrassment or a fear of physical injury.  Those aren’t the same thing, either.  Fear can be respect, terror, reverence, or dread.

Not too long ago I attended a week of training.  The instructor was once considered to be legendary in his field.  To be honest, it was a long week of instruction.  It wasn’t as engaging as I had hoped, but I did my best to keep my ADHD at bay it because my department was paying good money for me to be there.  It was the last day of this week-long class when I encountered a truly invasive concept.

According to the way this instructor viewed his research and education, fear is not an emotion—it is a natural reaction that happens when we are confronted with the unknown.  Fear is normal.  The only people who don’t feel fear are sociopaths.  Our reaction to fear is what inspires emotion.  When we are confronted by something overwhelming, we can react in one of two ways:

If we know we have the resources—the wisdom, knowledge, prowess, or ability—to confront and overcome that task, we lean into excitement and anticipation. 

If we know we don’t have the resources to confront and overcome that task, we spiral toward anxiety, distress, and unease.

I thought I was ready for this fight, but now I had my doubts.  I had doubts because I was now inside of the ring facing my opponent.  He was no longer an esoteric concept.  He was standing in front of me.

I saw and heard the referee at the edges of my awareness—a certain grayness amid the turmoil of my heartbeat, the look in my opponent’s eyes, and the ragged breaths moving in and out of my chest.

“Are you ready?” 

I nodded.

“Are you ready?”

My opponent nodded.

“Fight!”

I’d been here many times before.  I knew what to do.  I just didn’t know that I knew how to do it with an opponent of this caliber.  He was a huge step upward in the quality of my opponents.  I was getting better as a fighter and that meant that I wasn’t getting any easy fights.  This was the hardest opponent I had ever faced.  It was supposed to be the hardest opponent I had ever faced.

We moved toward each other to meet at the center of the ring.  I studied the way he moved and the posture in his body.  I knew he was going to be skilled.  He had that kind of reputation.  I didn’t know if I was ready for this moment—for this opponent.

My coach had put me through a tough camp to make me ready.  The past several weeks had been a crucible of miserable proportion.  I had been willing to put in the time because I desperately wanted this win.  My coach found a group of the fiercest training partners possible—every one of them bigger, stronger, and more skilled than me.  I had suffered through the camp.  I had told myself that I really wanted this win, but now that he was in front of me, I was questioning my choice.

In the way of fights, we circled each other for a moment, exchanging a couple of tentative punches before coming together in an active clinch.  The moment my hands found him I felt something.  It was a tangible moment.  I pushed and I felt him move.  I pulled and felt him move again.  We had weighed in at the same weight, but I felt stronger in this moment. I felt faster.  I felt more technical.  My camp had been difficult, but it had prepared me for this very moment.

All my fear—all my apprehension and my doubt—melted away.

There, in the center of that ring, I couldn’t help but smile.  Even in front of that crowd, even with all the stressors of doing battle against another human being who wanted to cause me harm, I knew that I was more than ready.  I knew I was going to win this fight, and I knew it was only a matter of which round I was going to win it in.  A certain giddiness began to creep into my movement.  I felt loose, as if I could let go and play.  It was going to be a good night for me, but it was going to be a bad night for him.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to define fear by its opposite—that’s a thing that I think we all tend to do.  I often ask myself—or I ask others—what is the opposite of fear.  Is the opposite of fear faith?  Or is it hope?  Or maybe courage? 

It’s entirely possible that this is, in fact, not even the right question.

If fear is a neutral—if it is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong—then there might be no opposite to it.  Fear cannot be countered or neutralized by virtues such as courage or fortitude.  Neither can it be defined by companion concepts such as doubt and anxiety.  If fear is truly a neutral encounter, then it can have no opposite.  It simply exists—even if it exists at the most inconvenient of times.  Fear isn’t an emotion, or a feeling, or even a sensation.

Fear is a pivot. 

It is the momentum and the motivator.  It tells me that I must react.  Fear informs me that something is about the change because something needs to change.  Fear is completely oriented toward my survival, but I want so much more than survival.

A thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance. (John 10:10) 

I know that the three standard reactions to fear are flight, fight, and freeze.  I’ve read a bunch of the books and seen the research.  Some of it quite fascinating. 

I don’t tend to be the sort of person who freezes under pressure, and that’s not always a good thing.  Often, the best choice to a fearful challenge is to pause and reflect.  But I don’t like to pause.  I have an aversion to it.  I feel like I should be engaging the threat.  Anything less might reflect poorly on me and my reputation.

I despise the idea of flight.  I hate the very concept of running from my fears. It makes me feel like a coward, and that leaves only the option to fight.  I really like to fight.  I prefer when my fears are things that I can identify and turn my efforts directly toward.  Even when my fears aren’t things that I can fight, I’m probably going to find a way to force some kind of combat.

For God has not given us a spirit of fearfulness, but one of power, love, and sound judgment. (2 Timothy 1:7) 

There are plenty of things out there worthy of fear.  But what’s the alternative to confronting them?  Lock myself in my house?  Build a saferoom where nothing can reach me?  Even in my most compromised moments I recognize how foolish that prosect is.

I can’t hide from danger, and I can’t hide from bad stuff.  Also, I can’t pretend I’m not afraid of the bad stuff.  I cannot be unafraid because I cannot escape the fear.  There is fear.  I am afraid.  I have fear, but do I choose to let fear own me?

There are time when fear causes me to want to hide.  It’s a form of flight, but if I call it seclusion it might seem a bit more brooding and romantic.  If I can’t be seen I can’t be found, and if I can’t be found, I can’t be haunted.  I could seek out shelter in isolation and isolation is no shelter at all.

The slacker says, "There's a lion outside! I'll be killed in the public square!" (Proverbs 22:13) 

Weirdly, I don’t think I typically struggle with being afraid in the moment.  My fear is seldom anchored in the here and now—I recognize that this is not true for everyone, but I think it is usually accurate for me.  I’m pretty good at dealing with fear while it is happening.

That’s not the fear that threatens me, though.

I constantly battle against future fears.  It’s the place where I find the most doubt and anxiety.  I don’t know if I’ll have the resources to overcome what I enounter there.  I don’t know if I have the resources because I haven’t been to there yet.  It hasn’t happened.  So I seek out a blueprint to inform the mystery in the only place I can find it.  I search for the future in the past.

My mind reaches into experiences long gone, taking hold memories that live there and yanking them into a future beyond my reach.  I don’t even pause for a moment to experience my moments in the present—I steal all the joy and desperation of now from myself.  Instead, I begin to build stress and anxiety based on a future that hasn’t happened and is constructed on the foundation of a past that has already gone.

Do not remember the past events, pay no attention to things of old.  Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:18-19) 

For many, night time is a place where fear abides.  That’s often true for me, as well.  But it’s not because I have any fear of the dark or what’s in it.  It’s because, in the dark where things are still, my mind becomes its own worst enemy as it seeks to overthrow and overturn me.  My brain cannot be trusted in the dark.  I have a special ability to drag the past into my future when my eyes have nowhere to focus.

I can terrify myself with a fear of my own making.

I think it helps me to acknowledge the fear for what it is—the fear is a pivot.  The fear is a choice that I have to make.  Fear is a motivator, teacher, and identifier—in the space of an instant it can reveal everything wrong about me.  I’m not a comic book hero whose fear centers were removed from my brain by some toxic sludge.  I have fear.  I have fear every day.  It’s a part of who I am.

If fear is a pivot—if fear is a neutral—and if fear has no opposite, then maybe fear is a question waiting for an answer.

Maybe I already know the answer.

Maybe the answer to fear is truth.

I can’t fight fear with willpower—God knows I’ve tried.  I can’t pass over, under, or through fear on my own strength.  I’ve tried that too.

If I’m going to move past the fear into the place where trust lies, then I have to set an anchor in the strongest, most unshakable place I can find.  I have to set my anchor in truth.

I’ve been told that the opposite of fear is trust—trust that God will give me the resources I need.  If fear is neutral and has no opposite, maybe trust is actually an ideal that lies on the other side of fear.  I can only validate that trust when I choose to cross through fear to where it lies.  It’s possible that journey is called courage—the journey through fear into trust.  Maybe, just maybe, my trust and my courage may be transformed into something that resembles faith.

God isn’t calling me through the fear because He wants to shame me—He’s calling me because He wants to prove Himself to me.  He wants to show me that I’m safe with Him.  I don’t know why that’s so hard for me to understand.  Everything about my spirit and soul know that the shelter of the Living God is the safest place I could ever reside, but I still can’t force myself to abide there sometimes. 

It might be my shame.  It might be lack of trust because I allow myself to be immobilized by fear.  I wonder, often, if some dark part of my heart believes that God might have bad things in mind for me—or, possibly, just not the best things.  Maybe I’m afraid that all the things that I’ve messed up in the past are going to cost me the best future that I could have had.  Maybe I already ruined it.

Doubt is an ally to my fear.  It feeds it and keeps fear alive.  But doubt is powerless when I set my eyes to the truth, and as the doubt fades, so also does the fear.  When fear fades faith rises.

Even when it doesn’t seem I have enough faith to move through fear, truth cannot be extinguished.  Truth cannot be moved and it cannot be shaken, because the truth doesn’t belong to me.  I can’t own it or change it.

My faith may not burn as brightly at some times as it does at others.  Maybe the weakest times are the time when  it is strongest, because those are the times when I cry out the same words as a once-desperate father cried out thousands of year ago.

Immediately the father of the boy cried out, "I do believe! Help my unbelief." (Mark 9:24) 

I want to believe enough that I can move through the fear to the place where I learn trust, but I think God might be telling me that’s not what this is about.  I can’t overcome something that doesn’t have an energy of its own—I can’t overcome a pivot.  I can’t overcome the place where I must choose to move forward, backward, or stand in place.  Fear is natural and it is a voice speaking into my spirit that something about to change, whether I like it or not.  I don’t get to choose the change, I only get to choose terms of the change.

I can choose to acknowledge my fear, much like I once used to acknowledge my opponents during weigh-ins the night before a fight.  We would look each other in the eye and flip a short nod of the head, knowing that we were soon about to go to war.  We knew there was no turning back.  We were committed to the fight.  There was no turning back.

There’s no turning back from fear.  Fear is a pivot that offers me the choice to turn in a direction.  Maybe, if I can learn to own my fear enough I can decide what direction to turn into.  I think I need to learn to place my fear in the right place.

(Proverbs 9:10)  "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

I am going to be afraid.  I am going to have fear.  There’ s no way away from that fact.

If I can pivot my fear to the right place—toward the most fearful and fearsome source I know—there’s a chance that  my other fears might find perspective.  I might remember that a future can’t harm me if it’s held in the hands of one worthy of all fear.  I can’t choose if I’m afraid, but I can choose where I turn my fears to.

I find myself in the same place again.  I’m fighting the choke.  I’ve failed once more. 

I can feel his hand tightening my collar snugly around my neck.  His back-control is heavy and difficult to escape.  But I don’t have time to escape—I have to survive.  The only thing between his choke and my neck is the hand that I barely managed to wedge into that space.

It’s not going to last.  It’s not strong enough.

I know I can’t stay here.  I have to move.  I have to fight.

I messed up.  He took my back.  I should’ve stopped him from passing my guard. 

But I can’t live there now.  The past is gone.  I have to deal with what’s happening right now.

Right now I’m being choked, and I don’t want to be choked.

I test the pressure and feel it tighten.  He’s relentless.  I might escape this choke, but I’ll still be in this bad position.  He’ll still be on my back.  Nothing good happens when this guy is on my back.

I can’t worry about that right now.  I have to address the choke or it’s all over.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better, but I know I know how to deal with this.  I’ve done it before.  I’ve drilled it, trained it, sparred it, and fought it.

I have what I need, I just have to pull the trigger.

I can’t dwell on what’s already happened and I can’t worry about what I can’t do next.  I have to worry about what’s in front of me right now.  The past can’t hurt me because it’s already gone.  The future can’t harm me because it’s not here yet.

There is only the moment in front of me.

Though an army deploys against me, my heart is not afraid; though a war breaks out against me, still I am confident.  I have asked one thing from the LORD; it is what I desire: to dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, gazing on the beauty of the LORD and seeking Him in His temple. (Psalms 27:3-4)