Fear... It Sneaks Up On You

"To him who is in fear everything rustles." 
Sophocles

Yesterday I travelled from Hong Kong all the way back to Edinburgh. I love travelling. I love the excitement of getting to the airport, of checking in, going through security (I know it's not everyone's idea of excitement), walking through duty free, waiting at the gate, boarding, taxing, take off etc. One of the things I love is the idea of not knowing what to expect when you land. All you know is that it will be different from the place you left behind.

However, on my most recent flight I realised something quite distressing: I hate turbulence. I don't know what it is about turbulence that scares me but I spend the whole time in the air expecting it. I find myself praying in these times that God would make it stop. In these moments when the plane is bobbing around and I feel like a piñata in the sky, I really would like God to stop focusing on Haiti and really just care about me. This fear is new to me and it seems to have snuck up on me .

The problem with this fear is that it is taking over my love of flying. It is making me more scared of something that is statistically very rare and sucking the joy right out of the experience. It is making my fear the centre of experience.

While flying back from Hong Kong I was able to watch the presidential debate that took place in the USA. What struck me more than anything was the central place of fear within the arguments. The debate moved away from what the policies reflected but to focused more on the fear that if the other person became president then the outcome would be catastrophic. Both candidates presented the other as a somewhat of an antichrist. That the end of the world would come to pass if the other was in power.

What is it about human fear that drives us. Our predictions of the future and possible outcomes never seem include the positive outcomes. It never seems to predict joy on the other side. It seems to me that when we taint the experience or the other with fear we inherently extract the positive. Our fear becomes greater than our experience.

Now I have a candidate who I would like to win and so obviously their fear based assessment appeals to my fear based assessment. However, if the other candidate were to win, what would that mean for me? Would the world stop spinning? Would the fear be realised? Would I not be able to cope? Would I not arrive at my destination?

I am now asking myself about the manifestation of fear within our society. Both the visible and hidden. Those fears that we allow ourselves to speak openly about and those we keep in the shadows or "locker room". Some fears we need to acknowledge are so hidden that they manifest in other ways. What I mean by this is that we might be scared for example of death but instead of dealing with our own mortality we unbeknown to us  push those who are sick away. We wrap ourselves in emotional bubblewrap.

I wonder where fear rears its ugly head in our society, work, thoughts, government, theology. If we are honest about our theology we need to ask serious questions about how fear forms our understanding of God, the bible, justice, care, etc. We can easily start to form God into our fears and not into our joys. God becomes a crutch that supports our fears rather than liberating it. God becomes our mutual oppressor rather than our saviour/liberator. I wonder how much of our theology we have to deconstruct in order that we might be able to just take the fear out.