Fear is a gale-force wind, tearing us asunder,

Rending, families, futures, destroying wonder.

Fear is the malignant lifeblood pulsing the veins of culture.

Fear is that tender place inside.

When touched, we lash out, bolt, or hide.

Fear is a jewel, refracting truth and lie equally.

Fear is a friend who speaks truth in love—or hate.

Fear is a gift, unasked for but desperate.

I grew up a free-range child. Our neighborhood gang daily dared death. We swam Bear Creek lifevestless, rode stingray bikes and Tecumseh minibikes helmetless, engaged in B. B. Gun wars safety-glassless, roamed miles from home mapless. All this took place virtually parentless. Therefore, I considered myself fearless.

But my parents and upbringing were not solely to blame for this grave misunderstanding of myself and fear. Fear is one of our most misunderstood emotions, and that’s saying something. Popularly, we’re told to face, fight, and deny our fears. One catchy slogan tells us F.E.A.R. is False Evidence Appearing Real. Famously, FDR intoned during WWII we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Many Christians believe being afraid is a sin. There’s even a false biblical statistic flying around that claims there are 365 fear nots in the Bible, one command against being afraid for each day of the year.

Because fear drives so much of life, we wish God thundered, “Fear not!” like a scolding parent on her last nerve, echoing it until we finally get it. But in reality, though the word fear appears biblically 457 times, it only shows up in the fear not formula fifty-six times. I, possibly like you, have labored under many false assumptions about fear.

Fear is a modern epidemic, with as many as 500 recognized phobias. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly 38 million adults and about 62 million adolescents reported experiencing a “specific phobia.” That’s roughly one-third of the American population. And that says nothing about everyday fear. Barry Glassner, sociologist and author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, concluded: “Our society is defined by fear.” Fear is our most feared of emotions.

But fear is a gift. All of our emotions are God-given, whether we understand or like them or not. Anger, hunger, sorrow, need for rest, love, joy, and even fear are part of our human design. In the beginning, God sat with his brush and palette and, when finished, admired his art and said, “It is very good.” Though after Genesis three, everything good about God’s creation is bent and distorted like a Picasso painting. Many believe, at least subconsciously, that fear was not a part of God’s original plan. But consider when God tells the first two naked humans, “Don’t eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil or you will surely die.” Two things must be true for that command to make sense. First, Eve and Adam must have had some inkling of what death was, even though neither had experienced it. Second, they must have been afraid of it.

I remember warning my two-year-old daughter to stay out of the street or she could be hit by a car and be hurt. Or killed. Shudder. She understood not what any of that meant, but she looked at my face, read the concern there, and a God-given fear she didn’t fathom stirred in her. Eventually, she learned not to run into the street. Studies with young children show that fear is a seed planted in us that grows as we observe our parents’ responses until it blossoms into an ubiquitous self-protective mechanism. From looking into the Creator’s face, Adam and Eve understood a shadow of the gravity of God’s command. “We don’t really know what death is, but look at God’s face. This is serious.” Unfortunately, they eventually ran into the street anyway. And we now have a distorted view of God’s face, and therefore, a warped view of fear.

I began my journey to a more honest relationship with fear by reading Ralph Keyes’ The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear. His thesis, “[F]ear can be transcended, can even be made part of the writing process itself,” was a marker at the trailhead of a trek I didn’t know I needed to embark on. A trail to not only writing more deeply and transparently, but living that way as well. As I devoured his book, for the first time in my life, I consciously doubted my understanding of fear, my belief that I was above or beyond it.

I was, in fact, not fearless, heedless, maybe, when it came to childhood adventures, especially. But regarding exposing my soul and possibly losing friends or offending my tattered family, no. My childhood trauma of being left alone at two years of age, crying in a hospital room, and of losing my father at eleven told me abandonment was the worst thing that could happen to me. Physical danger and pain were endurable. Aloneness was not.

As in the scene in The Wizard of Oz, where Toto pulls back the curtain, revealing the Wizard in all his shameful deceit, Keyes yanked the viel and there I stood, hiding, trembling. Alone because of my worry over abandonment.

Like Adam and Eve, fear sent me into hiding. I mainly hid inside books, and so, no surprise, God used a book to expose me and began my healing. We cannot be healed of that which we deny or ignore. Slowly, as I’ve grappled with and understood and befriended afraidness, I’ve grown more genuine and available to my family and friends. Fearfulness also kept me and my writing prescriptive and shallow. I spread insight and answers like so much manure. Keyes argues this shallowness comes from “That Naked Feeling.” For me, this was more than “imposter syndrome.” I feared that I would say, do, or write something that would justify being deserted. All the while, I admired authors such as Enger, L’Engel, Wangerine, and Beuchner, who were fearfully honest. They wrote with authentic, recognizable voices, wearing their doubts and foibles as well-earned bruises.

Paradoxically, my hiddenness from others guaranteed abandonment, but when I have managed an authentic, transparent voice, people have drawn near. This does not mean I’ve overcome fear, but rather laid it into the bricks of my life’s narrative like mortar.

God, however, had been trying to teach me the truth about fear long before I even knew him. I was in ninth grade and on a weeklong backpacking trip in the Colorado Rockies with two friends. None of us had ever ice-climbed before. We didn’t even know what we didn’t know. We had no ropes or cleats.

“Let’s climb up and see if it’s a bear or a person,” Tim said, pointing to tracks that seemed to lead into a cave near the top of the glacier that rose hundreds of feet above us. Sun glinted off the sheer ice as if off a dirty picture window. I pushed my long hippie hair behind my ears and folded my arms over my skinny ribcage, trying to appear brave.

They started up, hacking footholds with their boot heels. Tim’s collie stayed by Tim’s side and climbed easily.

I stayed planted on the edge of Crater Lake. Twin fears fought it out inside me. My fear of dying versus my foreboding friendlessness. My best friend had moved away. That Tim and Greg had invited me on this backpacking trip felt like a miracle. But the miracle was conditional, as was their friendship.

Tim paused about sixty feet up, petted his dog, and glanced down at me. “Come on, unless you’re chicken,” his look said. I didn’t know what death would be like, but I knew what starting the school year with no friends would be like, daily death.

I started hacking footholds with my boot heels and inching up the glacier like a hesitant shadow. Tim and Greg climbed fearlessly. Alone on the side of the steep glacier, I tried not to look down or look stupid or afraid. Finally, several hundred feet above the lake, I drew near my friends, smoking, sitting comfortably on a rock ledge.

“They’re not bear prints,” Greg shouted. “Just another person. And it’s not a cave.”

I now needed to cross the vertical face thirty feet horizontally. Distracted by my desire to look cool and brave, I stepped out. But my right foot found no traction; my left foot followed suit; then both feet suddenly windmilled, catching nothing. I reached and dug my fingers into the hard ice, but found no grip. Heart thundering, I began a slow glissade, steadily picking up speed toward deadly rocks and the lake hundreds of feet below. Panicked, I flailed and dug and scratched. To no avail. I flopped over on my back, thinking I could dig my elbows and heels in and stop my fall. But they acted like sled runners not brakes.

Time does slow down in deadly situations. I thought of my dead dad and wondered if I’d see him in heaven. What would my mom do without me? Meanwhile, the ice burned away beneath me.

Suddenly, to my left, the big collie flashed, his long claws digging into the ice. He maneuvered in front of me. I thudded into his warm, hairy body. We slid together and slowed, then stopped. Tim called his dog, and I clung to him as he hauled me up to the rocks.

Fear is a messenger. It essentially tells us when we are in over our heads. It wags its bony finger, pointing between our mountain-sized trouble to an Omnipotent-sized God. This is the kind of fear the anonymous biblical author of the letter to the Hebrews named eulabeomai, Greek for good fear. Eu means good, and labeomai fear. Yes, good fear. “By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, prompted by good fear, built an ark to save his family.” (Hebrews 11:7, my translation)

So, when God says, “Fear not,” in Isaiah 43, he does so not because there is nothing to fear or because fear is wrong. Isaiah 43 and the other fifty-five fear nots in scripture are not true commands, though they use imperative verbs. Rather, they are a promise of comfort. In The Message, Eugene H. Peterson translates Isaiah 43:1-3 with this sense of comfort rather than command.

“Don’t be afraid, I’ve redeemed you.

I’ve called your name. You’re mine.

When you’re in over your head, I’ll be there with you.

When you’re in rough waters, you will not go down.

When you’re between a rock and a hard place,

it won’t be a dead end—

Because I am God, your personal God,

The Holy of Israel, your Savior.

I have a friend who, as a young father, after already having lost one child, found himself terrified when their two-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer. Though his son couldn’t understand what was going on, he, too, was terrified. He’d wake at night screaming and trembling. There were no words my friend could say to calm his son. Heartbroken, he could only climb into his son’s little bed, hold him tight, and whisper, “Shhh. I’m with you. Quiet now.” Eventually, his son, in his father’s strong presence, calmed and slept. Not because he was commanded to, not because the danger was past, but because he was comforted. Fifty-six times, God tells us fear not, because he is with us.

The gift of fear is diamond-like, hard and beautiful all at once, multifaceted, moving from blaring alarm to comforting friend showing us the way to trusting in the God whose perfect love shuts the door on living in fear.

The Gift of Fear

Eugene C. Scott

Cheryl Eichman

The Gift of Fear

Eugene C. Scott

Cheryl Eichman

A Ministry of Pages and Presence

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