To be scared. To be Christian.

This has been an interesting and stressful week. Our ant problem came back, and apparently some mice came in from the storm and are sheltering in our house now. On top of that, I had to take my wife into the hospital last night for premature contractions. I’m worried. I’m worried we won’t be able to afford to live if my wife can’t work for a while. I am worried that we won’t get this place healthy and safe before the baby comes. I am worried that I won’t be a good dad. I’m terrified something will happen to my wife or our child. I’m scared I’ll fail as a pastor, that I’ll miss an event or a crisis in someone’s life I’m worried that I will just be teaching people to lie about their faith and no one will come to God through my service. And all of that is a problem, because I’ve been told as a Christian, and especially as a pastor, I shouldn’t ever be afraid. Somehow to have fears is not to have faith to many believers today.

Should a Christian ever be afraid? Does being afraid mean we don't have faith? The Bible talks about not fearing, but most of those verses appear to be talking about when something amazing happens but people overreact to it, like the angels appearing throughout Jesus’ birth story. People are encouraged to fear God throughout the Old Testament. But the Psalms are pretty specific about not being afraid of anything that comes our way because God is on our side. Even so, Job mentions that he had been afraid and he was as near to perfect as someone can get. So which is it? We are fearful, or never afraid?

Part of the problem is that the Hebrew term for fear is such a vague word. It can be a wide range of stuff from outright terror to respect and reverence. But that doesn’t really solve everything. If anything, it just makes the problem more difficult. And am I seriously supposed to be able to walk into a gang fight in the Tenderloin without being worried? I don’t think so. An absence of fear doesn’t seem to be the issue. In fact, the Bible recognizes that we can even be afraid of God. We are worried about stuff all the time.

But to the early Hebrews everything was action oriented. Nothing was abstract. We can’t fear without it affecting our actions. If we are supposed to remember something it doesn’t just mean in our mind but with our actions. If we worship God it isn’t just with our mouths but with our actions too. The Bible, and especially the Old Testament, assume that our actions and our words are connected. If we say something then we’re also acting out of that, and vice versa. The idea that we can say something without it affecting us would be lost on them.

So perhaps what the Bible is saying is not that we should never experience fear, but that we should never act out of that fear. We act from our trust and fear of God, we don’t act based on our fear of what might happen. It’s like a bunch of sailors who throw out an anchor in the storm. They trust the anchor will keep them stable, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get scared when the storm comes. It just means that they don’t panic and try to sail out of it.

I am scared to death, but won’t change how I act. As a Christian, I have an anchor. Does that mean I won’t be freaked out? No. Does that mean I’m not freaked out already? No. But it means that I will trust that my anchor will hold. Not being afraid, in a very ancient sense, is a choice not to let your fear influence you, affect you, take over. That is a choice I have to make every day.

Too often we are told we are supposed to be super people, and if we have any negative emotion we have failed to be Christian, to have failed to have faith. If we think that, the guilt itself can overcome us because we all have emotions. Keeping them bottled up forever is not the answer. The answer is to permit ourselves to be worried, afraid, terrified even if the situation calls for it, but not let that terror dictate our actions. Our actions should be rooted in our anchor, Jesus.

Barbara Taylor Brown, in her book "Leaving Church" puts it very well when she says "I discovered that faith did not have the least thing to do with certainty. Insofar as I had any faith at all, that faith consisted of trusting God in the face of my vastly painful ignorance." Faith is not found in being certain of what will happen, or lost in the face of fear. Faith is found and kept when even though we are uncertain of the future and fearful of what may happen were are still choosing to trust God with our lives.