Taliakum
Fear seems to be a universal experience for all earthlings, though at different levels of intensity. It sweeps across all religions and worldviews. It somehow wraps you up like a shadow wraps up a pillar. Joining a new school, college, job and anything new shakes your heart. People of all ages go through some amount of fear at various times in their lifetime. So given this reality of life, how do we view life as Christ’s disciples?
At the outset, every child of God must know that you can be fearless because you have been afraid before. The Bible recounts stories of men and women who have been afraid before and eventually became fearlessly bold later.
You and I have been bought with the blood of Jesus fearlessly. Jesus was there in the centre of your life when you braved the storm and your boat safely met the soft sandy shore. That happened several times over and you can testify easily to that. His love still endures. You saw that written on the sand. The disciples thought Jesus was a ghost when he came walking on water. He immediately dispelled their fears and told them, “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid” (Mathew 14:27). Notice that Jesus particularly and intentionally used the first person pronoun “I” to let us know that he indeed has a first-hand personal involvement when our life’s tempest rumbles because we have been fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). We are fearfully made not to fear.
As I type this write-up, I suddenly see some of the keys on my laptop light up. Looking closer, I find that the morning sunrays have broken through my window and spread over the keyboard. It is such a delight that God’s light also glimmers through shedding light on your uncertainties as you hold on to Him. Psalm 84:11 assures us, “For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.”As we see, to be fearless is to walk uprightly. Have you been walking uprightly of late? Do an ‘upright walking’ check-up and assess whether no good thing has been withheld from you. God also has been dispelling fears and nursing humanity with grace ever since the days of Genesis.
The 1957 movie ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ takes us back to the World War II era where POWs under the Japanese forces worked as forced labour to construct a 415km railway between Burma and Thailand from 1942-43 – a one year stint of untold misery and hardship. Many died during its construction due to cholera, dysentery, starvation, exhaustion and other causes.
One person died for each wooden sleeper laid. Hence, it is popularly known as the “Death Railway.”They worked for 18 hours a day and survived on 250 grams of rice. And like the sunrays on my keyboard, Ernest Gordon, a British army officer, was also among the POWs. He eventually became a minister of the Gospel after the prison was shut down in 1945.Faith gets the better of fear. It might sound strange but we are not called to be POWs of fear.
Elsewhere in the Bible a young man was gripped by a ‘spirit of fear.’ That was Timothy and he had bouts of fears for several reasons. He was looked down upon just because he was young in age (1 Timothy 4:12). He was required to take up a pastoral responsibility, though not a pastor. He was known to be reserved in nature and could not handle awkward situations. Paul, his mentor and senior told him to be ‘of power, love and sound mind’ (2 Timothy 1:7) not to be in a ‘spirit of fear.’ Paul continued to keep in touch with young Timothy to offer hope and strength in Christ in times of fear. Many centuries after Timothy, Etty Hillesuma young Jewish girl took on fear from a different plane while staying in Auschwitz. She kept letters and diaries of the horrific experiences in the concentration camps. Thousands were gassed to death daily. She wrote, ‘And I want to be there right in the thick of what people call horror and still be able to say: life is beautiful. Yes, I lie here in a corner, parched and dizzy and feverish and unable to do a thing. Yet I am also with the jasmine and the piece of sky beyond my window.’ She knew what it meant to be in fear. Yet she was overcome by ‘power, love and sound mind’ with whiffs of jasmine fragrance blowing away her fears and blue skies of hope above. Down there in the valley of fear we realise our sole dependency on God: none but Jesus as the song goes.
Everything has a beginning. To dispel fear is to begin giving away more of ourselves to God and revealing more of Him. What we are not sure of often causes fear. Life happens like waiting for the computer monitor to open up after you have pressed the power button. It’s there. You just have to wait a little longer for it turns itself on. Jesus is already there behind the unfolding monitor of your life and the welcoming screen that you see is: “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.”
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