Fear And Fearing Not

Fear and Fearing Not

I used to be fearless. I was. And even as a grown-up, I consider myself something of a risk taker and mostly brave. But maybe I don’t look brave. Once my pastor asked from the pulpit if anyone in our congregation had gone skydiving. When I raised my hand, he looked shocked. “Leigh McLeroy! You?” Yes, me. And I loved every crazy, wind-rushing, heart-pounding second of it. So these days, when I find myself on firm ground with that odd, disoriented free-falling feeling in my gut, I am truly surprised. And I’m feeling it more and more.

What if I lose my very modest but hard-earned savings? What if I don’t have enough work this week or month or year? What if I wake up one day and the words refuse to come, or a chronic ailment becomes acute and renders me helpless to help myself? What if lifelong friendships fade or loved ones die or no one really ever has my back? What if I open my heart again and it’s manhandled or, worse, ignored?

I don’t like my fear. At all. But God says a certain kind of fear is good. Fear him, he says, and wisdom can begin. But for any other cause he insists again and again, “Fear not.” So I am to fear. And not to fear. C. S. Lewis weighs in: “It is very desirable that we should all advance to that perfection of love in which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable, until we have reached that stage, that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear.”^a

Fear. And fear not. Fear him, and in fear of him, fear nothing else.

God is love, and the man whose life is lived in love does, in fact, live in God, and God does, in fact, live in him. . . . Love contains no fear—indeed fully-developed love expels every particle of fear, for fear always contains some of the torture of feeling guilty. This means that the man who lives in fear has not yet had his love perfected.

1 John 4:16, 18, PHILLIPS

^a C. S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: HarperCollins, 1960), 117.