I have a complicated relationship with fear.

Like many kids, I was afraid of the imagined things that could find me in the dark. As a tween, I became afraid of the man who would stop his lawn care and maintenance every afternoon to glare at me. Every day when I walked by his house on my way home from school in broad daylight, he would do the same thing. I would scurry past, confused and afraid of his locked stare on me for as long as he could spot me on the sidewalk.

He never followed me or said anything to me, but his gaze was cold as ice. He’d look me over while he stood there holding up whatever tool he was using (like a weapon), his long blonde hair tied in a messy ponytail. He often wore button-up Hawaiian shirts covered in flowers and bright, happy colors, while the look on his face betrayed his attire. To this day, I don’t know why he glared at me, but I know I felt particularly afraid and aware of being a small girl with skin and hair much darker than his.

Fear can be a powerful motivator. It can stay in the body for a long time.

I was in fifth grade the first time a Christian used fear to motivate me away from wonder.

Back then, I knew a few things about Jesus, but neither I nor my family were considered “church people.” At that age, science, nature, and history filled me with a wild wonder and curiosity.

On a Monday at school, while walking back to the classroom after outside gym class, a new friend asked me what I’d done over the weekend. I told her about my trip to the natural history museum. I described the wooden evolution mural that had fascinated me. Her face scrunched together, and with eyes boring into my own, she immediately said, “You know that’s wrong, right?”

I thought about saying yes as my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. I couldn’t rewind and erase the excitement and fascination I’d just held in my voice, so I asked a question instead:

“Why is it wrong?”

She stood up straight and said, “Evolution isn’t Christian.”

Her quick defense of something I didn’t even really understand made me feel afraid. This friend didn’t intend to do that; she just passed on the fear she’d been given. The only invitation in her words was to make sure I was on the right side of a fence that I didn’t even know existed just moments before. I stood there like a deer in headlights, suddenly aware of oncoming traffic from both directions. This isn’t an article on creation versus evolution, by the way; this is about the way fear can resurrect barriers between two people or groups of people that are all made in the image of God.

Fear motivates and it multiplies. Sometimes it just lies.

As a child my fear kept me away from others. That kind of fear made me panic. That kind of fear made me hide the questions I really had. That fear made me judgmental and quick to squash curiosity.

Years later, I would learn that the Hebrew word for fear — yirah — used in verses in Deuteronomy and Proverbs to exhort people to “fear the Lord” meant more than what I’d experienced as a child. Yirah also means reverence, wonder, and awe.

In the New Testament, the Greek words phobon and phobos are also translated as fear — the kind of fear I experienced from a stranger on the sidewalk and my friend on the blacktop. This is the word John uses when he writes that “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18 NIV).

Jesus, perfect love personified, is the One who led me back to Him through that same wonder and curiosity I had in the natural history museum decades before.

It seems like there’s a lot of fear in our conversations and communities these days. It reminds me of the conversation I had with my friend on the blacktop. We’re still friends today, and we’ve both grown quite a bit. It’s easy to be bullied by someone else’s fear or pain, or to bully others with our own – even when we think we’re trying to push for what we are so sure we know is right. But I think of myself back then and the way this kind of fear didn’t really lead me closer to Jesus, but to a version of Him that would keep me hiding, panicked, worried there was something wrong with me – the same way I felt when I walked by that scary neighbor’s house.

God’s kingdom come isn’t coming through glaring eyes or finger-wagging. God’s kingdom come is coming through the perfect love of Jesus.

When I feel that same fear creep up in me, I say a breath prayer: Jesus.

When I feel tempted to respond to someone else in fear, I whisper the same breath prayer: Jesus.

May Jesus dispel the lie that love is too simple, too slow, too weak, too difficult, too impossible, or too woo-woo to hold us and all of our wonder and curiosity, and lead the way.

 

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