Saturday, July 21, 2007

Love Casts Out Fear

I lay in bed at two in the morning, my heart pounding wildly. For the thousandth time I went over the costs of college again, as if repeating the massive numbers would create money in my head. I turned over and tried to calm down. After all, if I didn’t get to sleep I wouldn’t be able to do anything in the morning, when my thoughts actually mattered.
I listened to the steady hum of the fan in the window which as it blew in the warm, humid night air. I tried to calm myself, but my skin tingled with the physical pain of anxiety. I could both hear and feel my heartbeat over the sound of the fan. I prayed to God, pleading with him to take away my fear.
At the same time I held onto my fear with all the strength I could muster. After all, if I didn’t hold on to fear, how would I prepare for anything? Without fear, I knew I would never be able to get anything done. I realized the absurdity of this clash within my mind, and tried to let go of my fear entirely.
My mind circled around the list of tasks that I needed to do, endlessly and thoughtlessly. It lit upon a particularly unpleasant one: tithe. I realized that it had been months since I had paid tithe. A pile of pay stubs lay on the desk, waiting for my attention. There was probably another hundred and fifty dollars that I couldn’t count on. I wondered when I would be able to pay the tithe. Malachi 3:10 shoved its way into my mind, clamoring to be heard above the crowd of other thoughts. I decided I would pay my tithe that Sabbath.
A roar of disapproval arose among the thoughts in my mind. A terror that was disproportional to the amount of money surged palpably through every nerve and vein, causing me to groan and turn over. I tried to grab my fear out of the darkness and hold it in front of me. It struggled like a living creature, fighting and fleeing from my grasp. Finally I realized what it was.
I feared that I would commit then fail: that I would not be able to go forward or back. Deep down inside I feared that life would become stuck. Somehow I thought that if I failed, life would stop right there like a game of cards when all of the options are gone. I dropped my fear and laughed at it, it was a stupid thought.
But the fear was still there, lurking, waiting to tear my very soul and break the fragile strands of reason that held my mind together.
I prayed again, pleading with God to make everything better, I didn’t even know what better meant. I pondered all the other people praying to God at that moment. Sincere prayers and prayers made out of habit, selfish prayers and selfless prayers, it made me seem very small at that moment.
“In and out and up and down and round and round until he found that life flows on from earth to ground, and ground is all but solid.” The words passed quickly through my mind. I contemplated them, not knowing where they had come from or what they meant.
Why did I follow God anyway? Sometimes it seemed to me that I did it simply because it was the right thing to do. I contemplated this reason and came to the conclusion that it was the wrong one. Not morally wrong per say, but simply a futile pursuit. One cannot be a living sacrifice because it’s “the right thing to do”. No, one donates money to charities because it is the right thing to do, and mails letters with a return address because it is the right thing to do. All this is well and good, but it is most assuredly the wrong reason to go live a life.
I thought, trying to come up with the right reason. At that moment I realized the purity of good and evil. On one hand stood pure, self sacrificial love. On the other stood darkness, hatred, fear and distruction. In between stood I, created by one and dying of the other. I stared in the face of good, and at that moment I wasn’t sure that “good” was such a jolly thing as I had always supposed. Good was sacrificing one’s self to help free the world from the cancer of sin that had engulfed it. Good was an omnipotent being seeing all of time, and deciding to die for my sins before I had committed them. The thought struck me hard (as thoughts sometimes do, when we hear them for the first time after hearing them all our lives). My greatest heights of achievement were just as irrelevant as my most abysmal failures. It was as if everything was happening in one instant. The universe WAS. I pictured God outside of time, staring at that which was, and is and will be, but not seeing any of them that way. The universe simply was, exploding in on brief yet never ending instant of expression.
And even though God could see through both ends of eternity, he foolishly decided to die for humanity.
My mind slowly fell back to earth. The world, the school, the room and the fool lying in it all seemed peacefully irrelevant. If I could live a life of infinite luxury, yet because of it one soul was lost, what kind of exchange would that be? I knew what good was. At that moment, good was the hand that put my tired mind to rest. For all moments, good was the force I would attempt to follow, sacrificing myself to drive out fear, hatred, and all other things but love.

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