Brief self-indulgent author’s note:
I’m going to start this post with complete transparency: this is the fourth draft of this, and I almost spent another day polishing it up. But this post isn’t ever going to be where I want it, and if I keep polishing and polishing and polishing, there won’t be anything of substance left: dry words on a dry page with no emotion or feeling. That’s not the point of this.
The point is to let you know that you are not alone – that God loves you. That you are worth more than what you produce. That it’s okay to feel afraid or angry right now.
So if you get nothing else out of the ramblings to come, know this:
- You are not alone – you are never alone
- Your best is not going to look like you think your best should look right now
- We are all in this together, but this looks different for each of us
- God loves you more than you could ever fathom
- It’s okay to cry; it’s okay to feel afraid; it’s okay to feel your feelings
- It’s okay to have questions about your faith and it’s okay to be faithful and afraid
Let us begin.
Reflection from Saturday, April 4:
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday.
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday and I won’t get a palm branch at the door of church this year.
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday and there won’t be a procession of children laughing and waving palm branches in the aisles.
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, where people lay down their garments and tore palm branches off of trees and welcomed the Son of God with shouts of “Hosanna”.
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday and the same people who greet this man with joy will call for his death in less than a week.
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday and we will wake up to more cases of a deadly virus and news of more deaths, and we’ll stream a church service instead of attending.
Tomorrow is Palm Sunday and I’ll wake up just like every other day: forgetting in the haze of recent sleep that anything is different before my brain kicks in and I realize everything is different.
Tomorrow is going to be weird.
Today is Saturday. It doesn’t feel like a Saturday. It feels like another day in a run of never-ending days; where the news keeps piling up like death tolls and March lasted forever. Spring is here – a time of new birth and resurrection, and literarily this pandemic would be better suited to the ushering in of Winter when all is curling in on itself: going dormant or dying as the warmth slips away like the light – earlier and earlier and earlier. But it’s not fair that winter has to bear the burden of everything dying either, and life doesn’t often lend itself easily to metaphor.
Tomorrow I’ll be holding a fake palm branch and fighting the fear in my chest as we try to sing “Hosanna”.
As for today…
Today just feels weird.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about fear lately. Specifically fear and the Bible.
The problem is that I’ve been on Social Media too much lately, and the quick bites of Bible or “Christian wisdom” that are easy to share aren’t typically surrounded by context or nuance or conversation.
The one that has come up a lot lately is “Do not be afraid. God’s got this.”
Do not be afraid. Do not fear. Do not be anxious.
But the truth is that I am afraid. I’m scared. This is scary stuff. I’m worried for my grandparents, for my elderly relatives, for my friends with underlying health conditions, for people who can’t afford healthcare, for people who have no home to retreat into, for people who aren’t hearing the message or are receiving mixed or wrong information and are putting themselves and others in danger. I’m afraid for the hospitals that don’t have enough ventilators and the healthcare workers who don’t have enough protective equipment, for the grocery store workers and custodians who are at risk every day, for those who have no choice but to work because they can’t afford not to work but have inadequate benefits or sick leave.
I’m scared that people are dying from something we cannot fight, and I’m scared that maybe we’ve accepted a certain number of people have to die for our society to keep functioning. I’m scared for the present and I’m scared for the decisions we might have to make in the future.
The truth is that I am afraid.
I confess that in the beginning I didn’t want to admit to my fear. I tried writing this post without putting my own fear out there, without admitting to my own humanity.
I thought being afraid made me a bad Christian or a bad pastor: here I am, putting my entire life and future into God’s hands, and a crisis comes along and suddenly I’m afraid?
“I’m a pastor,” I think.
“I need to control this fear,” I think.
“I can’t afford to be afraid,” I think.
The pastor in me wants so badly to say “the Lord says ‘Do not fear’,” and suddenly my anxiety will clear and all will be at peace.
I’ve learned the hard way: that’s not how it works at all.
If you Google “scriptures do not fear”, you get 101 different Bible verses with a lot of overlap. Blog posts of people telling you “God’s got this” and “God’s in control” and “don’t be afraid because God has a handle on this”. Social media posts blasting “do not fear” at you, with the implication that being afraid is wrong or bad, and being afraid means you aren’t trusting God like you should.
I do not want to be afraid. I hate the way that fear makes me feel.
But I confess that I am afraid.
See, I think the problem is that we often try to assign “bad” or “wrong” traits to emotions themselves. Anger and Fear in particular get labeled this way.
The truth is that emotions are emotions. We feel things because we are human.
I feel anger and I feel fear, and when I try to not feel these emotions, it ends up being harmful for myself and others. I feel them. I can’t deny that I feel them.
I am afraid. When bad news comes, when people are dying, when people are hurting, when there is something out there that I can’t control or fight, fear can be the first emotion I feel. And while I can’t stop that initial feeling of fear from happening, I can work to not let me fear rule me, and that is where I need God’s help, and that’s where turning to the Bible is helpful:
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and staff, they comfort me.” (Paslm 23)
Fear is coupled with comfort and presence in the Bible. The reason to not be afraid is that God is with us. It’s the encouragement that we are not alone that comforts and helps us to not fear.
During these periods of self-isolation, it feels like we are alone. We are physical beings who need the presence and touch of other people, and right now, we are being told not to touch – to stay away – to isolate – to separate – to distance ourselves from others. This is the right call – it’s the only thing we can do right now. But knowing it’s the right thing to do doesn’t make it easier to deal with. Even if you are self-quarantining with your family, there is still a loss of connection happening.
You are allowed to think that sucks. You are allowed to feel the loss of that. You are allowed to feel afraid and angry and maybe a lot like crying.
You feel what you feel, and you, dear heart, are allowed to be human.
The posts of “do not fear,” are meant to be helpful. And if they help, then great! But often I read them and I feel guilty for the flashes of fear I get. I believe that they are posted with good intent – with the very human desire to make others and themselves feel better about our current situation. I genuinely believe they come from a place of faith and love and care. This post is not meant to shame them, it’s to offer some context and nuance and permission to feel. It’s to offer some deep truths about faith and the Good News.
The Good News isn’t the prescription of “do not be afraid”, it’s the reassurance that no matter how alone we feel, we are never alone – for God is with us through everything. Through our fears and doubts and anger and stress and self-quarantining and worry and anxiety. God is with us always. God will neither leave us nor forsake us.
You have never been alone.
You are not alone.
You will never be alone.
But you are allowed to feel.
The difference is what we do with these feelings.
It’s when we let fear rule us that we get into trouble. It’s when we let fear control us that we end up hurting ourselves and others, and that’s when the emotion becomes a problem: during the action.
When our fear causes us to panic buy to the point that people can no longer get what they need, that is a problem. When fear causes us to lash out at other people instead of helping other people, that is a problem. When fear causes us to feel like we have to keep moving, keep going, keep producing, keep trying to make everything as normal as possible – then it’s a problem.
By acknowledging our fears and accepting that God loves us and is with us always, we stop letting our fear rule us and start letting it help us.
Fear of losing the people we love has caused us to reach out to people we haven’t spoken with in a while. Fear of not having enough has caused us to check on our neighbors and make sure they have enough.
The fear inside me isn’t something I can just switch off. But I can decide how to respond to that fear. Often it doesn’t look like what society would call productive. Often it looks like prayer or reading or knitting. It looks like working puzzles and building a fire. It looks like watching cooking shows and trying new recipes with the ingredients I have. It looks like finding better ways of communicating with the people I live with so we aren’t yelling at each other.
Take care of yourselves in this time. Take care of your neighbors. Acknowledge your fear, but do not let it consume or rule you. Accept that it is okay to not be as productive as you think you should be.
Most of all: know that God loves you more than you could ever know or feel or fathom. Know that God will never leave you or forsake you.
Know that you are not alone.
Peace be with you.
Another Author note: I know this time can be crazy. If you need to reach out to someone just to chat or vent or pour out your anxious thoughts; if you need prayer or some encouraging words; if you have questions or thoughts about God you want to share; email me at we.are.star.dust.wordpress@gmail.com
Let me know in your email if you want a response or not! (I figure some people just need a place to vent or shout into the void, so if you just need to type something and send it but don’t want a response, let me know that.)
Love to all of you!
We are stardust 