No Fear in Love
Here’s one of the strongest beliefs I have: fear can be a manipulative emotion. It stops us from being the people we were meant to be.
I grew up quite familiar with 1 John 4:18, the part of Scripture that reads, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”
That makes sense to me. I think love is our highest calling. The decisions you make because of fear are exactly the opposite of the decisions you’d make because of love.
Fear makes you turn your back on opportunities to help people. I think of how the U.S. used to resettle between 50,000-200,000 refugees in the 1980s and 1990s. While even more people have been displaced from their home in the past decade, we help fewer than ever, mostly because public sentiment has drifted towards fear.
But that’s not all. Some of the worst things throughout history have happened when one group of people is fed information designed to make them afraid of another group of people. Authoritarian strongmen rise to power when fear runs high. It seems so much more obvious when looking at the historical propaganda of dictators.
If love casts out fear, then the opposite is true. Fear invites hate. Fear has such a close and ugly relationship with hate. There’s something appropriate about words like homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Fear feeds the hatred directed at these groups.
So much of my life has been dedicated towards trying to denounce fear. I love globetrotting, seeking out places in the world that were often stigmatized. I’ve traveled a number of places, often without set plans. I’ve turned myself into a case study of how the world isn’t that scary after all.
A Holy Anxiety
Here’s one of the newer beliefs I have: the more you love, the more you have to fear. It’s a different kind of fear than the one that feeds hate. It’s more like a holy anxiety, and I never understood how that could be possible until I got married.
Six months after our wedding day, my wife Deanna started getting sick. A few antibiotics seemed to do the trick at first, only temporarily. We returned from a trip and knew she needed to check into a hospital. A lung infection plummeted her lung function down to 22%. We spent our first Valentine’s Day as husband and wife in a Portland hospital, her hooked up to IVs. Doctors voiced sobering concerns about her ever regaining the lost lung capacity, about us being able to someday have kids after that incident or what not.
We had a fortunate, and pretty much miraculous recovery. But from that point forward, I became hyper-vigilant about health risks. I gained the ability to quickly pick out sick people in a crowd to stay away from. I felt hyper protective when I felt she was being overworked by employers, lowering her immunity.
For years, I could never relate to worst-case scenario thinkers. Some people seemed to have such a vivid mental image of how every ordinary thing could end in catastrophe. For whatever reason, I have a lot of people in my life with that inclination, and I’ve always found it some combination of annoying, amusing, and foreign to me.
Last year, I became a dad. You hear so many new parents talk about how for the first time, their hearts exist outside of their bodies. For many people, this is the first time they discover how fear and love can be intertwined. It’s unneverving whenever you discover the limits of your abilities to protect someone you truly care about.
I still think the world isn’t as scary as people make it out to be. I still think fear stops people from living the life they were meant to. But there’s more nuance to this conversation now.
My journey has helped me grow spiritually, and it’s added more and more loved ones into my life. My wife. My son. The community around us. The global populations I’ve connected with. And as this love expands, the more I become aware of the things that threaten the people I love. And there’s a little more to be worried about.
The Worst Contagion
The most contagious virus of all is fear. But perhaps the second most contagious thing is apathy. Or complacency. Or whatever you want to call it when serious problems threaten the world’s vulnerable and those of us who are unaffected just sit accept it.
The past couple weeks, I’ve been pretty taken in by the unfolding of the coronavirus. I hate to admit that I’ve been a little fascinated by the dynamics of how the world responds to something like a quickly spreading epidemic. The outbreak’s narrative crosses paths with so many of my interests– genetics, travel, geography, problem-solving. But of course, it’s ultimately a tragedy, having claimed over 100,000 lives.
The most common reactions I see to the spread of the virus are almost totally the polar opposites of each other. One is entirely led by fear. The other is totally asleep to it.
In the face of an epidemic, panic does more harm than good. You see the cases of people stockpiling masks, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper, depleting retail supplies, creating price spikes and making it harder for the people who really need these defenses to find them. Panic is at its worst when it merges with prejudice, as we’ve seen directed at so many people of Asian heritage since the outbreak started.
On the other hand are those who have completely dismissed the virus as an overreaction. Many are eager to point out all the other things that have caused more deaths each year. To a lot of my peers, the virus isn’t that scary. They are young and healthy, and if they somehow managed to contract the virus, they’d most likely ward it off in a couple of weeks. But their response to the virus will still have an impact on people the age of my parents, or on people with more fragile immune systems like my wife. To say the virus isn’t a big deal because it only affects these populations is telling these people that their health doesn’t matter.
Neither of these responses seem right. Both the fear-driven frenzy and the insistence on inaction have the potential to do harm to a lot of people. Both prioritize the emotional needs of the individual rather than what’s best for everne.
This past week, the virus showed up fifteen minutes from our front door. A retail employee tested positive at a nearby mall. I’ve been talking more and more with Deanna about what we’ll do if we get to the point where we need to lay low for a little while. Her work puts her in frequent contact with our local population without housing.
The Gift of Fear
In the past few years, I’ve heard more and more about how fear isn’t entirely bad. It can cause a lot of trouble when we put it in the driver’s seat, but fear has a purpose.
Elizabeth Gilbert has been one of the best at articulating this. She highlights how we experience fear because it keeps us alive. The part of our brain that experiences fear is the part that kept us from being preyed upon by stronger species. Rather than being completely antagonistic towards fear, we can acknowledge it, thank it for the role it plays, and make a more sober decision.
The world is complex enough where two seemingly opposite things can both be true. Perfect love casts out fear. Loving others will give you more reasons to fear. But what really matters is the way we respond to scary situations. Coronavirus is the trending topic of the moment, but this is a question that comes up again and again.
When I think about our present day refugee crisis, it’s a topic where I feel very strongly that fear has gotten the better of us. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves to be afraid of some of the most vulnerable people groups on earth.
But then, the same part of the population that worries about refugee resettlement expresses little concern about climate change. Generally speaking. And the same segment of the population that argues against alarmist messaging about refugees seems to embrace it when it comes to climate. Are we too afraid? Are we not afraid enough? Maybe we just need a different way of thinking about these things altogether.
Here’s what I believe now: I still believe love is the highest calling and that perfect love casts out fear. But I don’t think that means never being afraid. It means moving through your fears, not around them, in order to do the right thing. Dismissing the concerns of other people isn’t being fearless, it’s simply being asleep to your own fear. And it isn’t helpful.
Instead, deciding to love anyways, after considering all the facts is the type of love that casts out fear. And it invites something else in its place. A loving concern. One where you’re looking out for the interests of other people in a way that’s informed, sober-minded, strategic, and wise.
Loving Concern
So, what’s the difference between giving into fear and showing a loving concern? I think a good distinction is that a loving concern is unselfish. It means that you can recognize that when it comes to an issue like coronavirus or a refugee crisis, you yourself might be safe but other people aren’t, and you can take steps towards changing that.
Loving concern looks like people stepping up to intervene against racism directed at Asians. It can look like being intentional about the way we talk about the virus. Showing generic images of Asian people wearing facemasks for unrelated stories, like our local newspaper did on Friday, does real harm. Refusing to refer to the disease as the “Wuhan virus” helps prevent stigma against that area.
Loving concern can look like reaching out to elderly relatives or immune-compromised friends. (Not necessarily in-person, if that would be unwise.) They have heard plenty about how they’re more vulnerable to this, and letting them know that they have your support is extremely valuable.
Loving concern can look like refusing to give in to panic-buying if you’re not in a population that is particularly vulnerable. The more N95 masks that are in your closet are N95 masks not available to people with chronic respiratory issues at a time when they’re in short supply. (Also, they’re much more effective if a sick person wears them versus a healthy person)
This virus is a lot of things. Sensational and urgent and threatening and novel. But don’t forget to keep things human. Loving concern knows that behind all the statistics, the new numbers from Italy and Korea and Iran, are human beings who are valuable and loved. Unfortunately, the human element has been missing from a lot of reporting.
“Every summer, the community puts on a neighborhood party with a band and swing dancers and an old fashioned car show. They invite the whole neighborhood,” Kris shared. “They have been a great asset to our neighborhood.”
Kris lives in Kirkland, Washington. The community she loved partying with was the Life Care Center, where 26 residents have died of the virus. “It’s not a time for showboating or bragging that you might’ve dodged a bullet,” she notes. “I’m worried about passing it on to someone tha twouldn’t be able to fight it. Heck, let me take it over anyone else in that care center.”
Refugees. Communities vulnerable to climate change. The elderly. The immunocompromised. Our family members. Our loved ones. The conversation completely changes when we shift the question from “what should we be afraid of?” to “how do we love and serve those around us?”