Fear not …

Fear can be a good thing if it causes you to duck a bullet or leap from the path of a speeding automobile. It can be an awful thing if it dominates your life and causes you to view the world and the future through dark glasses.

The year I became thirteen was the worst year of my youth. It turned bad the day my heart began skipping beats. Typically, it would pause, beat rapidly a few times, pause again, beat extra hard once, then fall back into normal rhythm. It would do this at odd times throughout every day. I was almost sure I was going to die, but I didn’t dare tell anyone what was happening. To tell would mean a doctor would get involved; he would no doubt confirm that I was dying, and I would have to face the certainty of my impending death. Irrational, ignorant, stupid — of course. But I was a teenager, okay? A teenager totally dominated by fear.

A year dragged by, with occasional moments of pleasure but pleasure always against a backdrop of terror that was obvious to me but hidden from any other human. Only gradually did the passage of time without my succumbing lead me to think that maybe, just maybe, I might not die from this thing after all. As more years passed, the spasms of erratic heartbeats gradually decreased in frequency and eventually stopped completely. And the heart that so terrified me at the age of thirteen has pumped faithfully and steadily for seventy more years, despite stress, strain, being deliberately stopped on the operating table, and even being broken a couple of times. I look back with regret that I let fear distort so much of my young life.

I’ve been reminded of my dark period by the way our country, having withstood enormous threats in its past, now seems to be sliding into a swamp of fear, overcome by a miasma of noxious fumes that can blot happiness from our lives. Like the young me, afraid to seek facts because those facts might be hard to bear, we ascribe evil motives and unusual powers to threats often ill-defined and easy to inflate. Somehow it seems more desirable to cower in fear than to seek the truth, because truth can be painful.

Some great leaders have recognized the existence of fear and emphasized overcoming it. General George S. Patton famously instructed his subordinate leaders to “take no counsel of your fears.” Others — Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Douglas MacArthur among them — are given credit for the same words. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the nation in the depths of its despair that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. A few years later, he let unwarranted fear of Japanese living on the west coast lead him to have them rounded up and put in our version of concentration camps, proving that what he’d said earlier was glaringly true.

Of far greater reputation than the best of military or political leaders, Jesus Christ urged those of us who profess to believe in him and follow him to “fear not.” He also said we should welcome the stranger at our gate, and that we should treat such strangers just as we would our own people. When we treat them that way, even the most insignificant of them, he said it is as if we were doing it for him. Maybe he added that this applied only to people who were already his followers and who didn’t have dark skin or come from populations where some have evil intent, but if so, that part was left out of my Bible.

I fully understand that we live in a dangerous world, and only a fool would ignore known threats. But I also understand that it is easy to overstate those threats and react in ways that ultimately damage us more than they damage our suspected enemies. Fear that ignites a determination to seek facts and act rationally is good. Fear that causes us to live in misery and act irrationally is an awful thing. I speak from experience.

This story was originally published February 11, 2017 at 4:56 PM with the headline "Fear not …."