When we think of the word "fearless" we often think of people who aren't scared of anything, of courageous risk-takers who are willing to step out in faith when others hold back. But I think, in more ways than one, that we've misinterpreted the meaning of fearless. In any case, we certainly celebrate it when perhaps we should be thinking about it with a bit of healthy criticism.
On Friday, our country will affirm a "fearless" leader as our nation's president. And he is definitely not a stranger to criticism, nor is he a stranger to speaking or tweeting whatever triggers a thought in his brain, be it grounded in fact or simply a series of neurological processes that, to him, appear true when they are, in fact, nothing more than a product of his own mind. He doesn't hold back. He doesn't care about working with his peers or his constituents. He doesn't seem to be afraid of anything...even when a healthy dose of fear would be a good and, perhaps, humbling thing.
I admit that living with any kind of fear, for someone who has pure OCD like myself, does not sound fun. NOPE. NO THANKS. Not on my list of things to accomplish in a given day, so PACK YOUR BAGS, GOOD SIR. Still, fear can be incredibly useful. My fear of losing my child in an accident or kidnapping prevents me from allowing her to go without a properly-fastened car seat or to wander off on her own unsupervised. Of course, without limits or boundaries fear that goes unchecked is detrimental to the physical, emotional, and spiritual body. But fear that gives us a certain amount of reverence for the myriad of decisions and challenges we face every single day is not only powerful; it's beneficial. Life-giving, even, as evidenced by the fact that my three-year-old made it through infancy.
As we approach the inauguration, let me say this: It's one thing to applaud the man who seems to have been born without a hypothalamus. It's a whole other thing to be afraid and act justly anyway.
The first is both easy and dangerous. The second is harder...and better.
I don't want to be fearless. What I want is to be brave.
And I will not celebrate a leader who pretends like nothing matters except his own ego. I will not stand behind a president who values power over service, who views so many of the people in his country as little more than pawns to achieve dominance.
I accept the reality of his office; I do not accept him.
Unlike our future president, I want to look at my fear—whether rooted in reality or totally made up in my head—and say, "I see you. And I hear you. But I'm not giving you the last word."
I think about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood—a very human response—because He was acutely aware of what He was about to face. Like we often do, my Savior cried out to His Father for one last safeguard against the brutal violence and burden of a whole world's sin that was about to be visited upon Him. But He didn't stop there:
“My Father, if there is any way, get me out of this. But please, not what I want. What do you want?” (MSG)
Jesus laid bare the whole human experience and gave voice to His fear and sorrow. And then He set it aside in favor of what the Father wanted Him to do. He didn't have to, you know. Jesus was as human as He was divine; He could have used His free will to flee and hide, to protect Himself and let us deal with our own nonsense. And, as God, He would have been more than justified in doing so. After all, it is our own free will—the gift bestowed upon us by Love—and the sin we chose as a result that breaks our hearts, not the commands of our Creator.
Still, Jesus refused to live by the dictates of the body. He was fearful...and chose to be brave.
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," He told His disciples when they continued to fall asleep on the job. (NIV)
He understood our struggle between the two. We want to be brave. We want to rise above. It's in our very nature, the identity and image of our Father stamped upon us the moment He imagined our existence. But our seemingly more present nature—our bodies—often speak louder. And because we have tuned into them far more often than we have our spirits, we have drowned out the truth of who we are and who God wants us to be.
We all do this in some capacity every day. Our new president has made a career out of it.
We were not created to live in fear, to let it overshadow our lives, but we will experience it. And we must learn how to hear what it's telling us without giving it the ultimate authority in our lives. It seems to me that the election of our future president is evidence of our failure in this regard. But we have an opportunity in the coming years to say, as I do to my own fears every day, "I see you. And I hear you. But I am not giving you the last word."
On January 20th, and every day after, let's choose what is better. Let's be brave.