What Are You Afraid Of?

Rebekah Gregory knows fear.  She knows it in a way that most people never will.  You may recognize Ms. Gregory’s name as one of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite many, many surgical attempts, she lost her lower left leg and she now walks with a prosthetic leg.  For nearly two years she lived in fear of her attacker, Dzhohkar Tsarnaev.  Try as Ms. Gregory might, she could not shake the images and the nightmares and the fear of confronting evil again.

Ms. Gregory, a fit 27-year old woman, blond hair, brown eyes, looks for all the world like a woman in control of life.  But, she wasn’t.  The tragic consequences of the bombing were with her, and will be for the rest of her life.  She was asked to testify at the trial of Mr. Tsarnaev, who faces the death penalty. She described her emotions to a television news reporter as beginning with a sense of dread as she approached the court room.  In a letter to her assailant she describes how she came to an amazing realization as she faced him in the courtroom.  She told the reporter, “When I walked into the courtroom and was able to look him in the face I realized that that fear was gone and I wasn’t afraid. He became nobody to me again.”  She posted a letter to the defendant on her Facebook page in which she describes how facing this person was “the crazy kind of step forward I needed all along.”

I don’t know what you deepest fear is these days.  Perhaps it is a fear caused by someone who you can, in a safe environment, come face to face with and find the beginning of healing.  More likely, what we fear is not a person but a more undefined dread. Mostly it is the loss of control; a loss of security; a fear of an unknown future.  Like Ms. Gregory, our prescription is to face our fears head-on, to find a way to control the fear so it does not control us.  What steps can you take to begin to overcome your fear?

For a 90-year old woman I know, her fear is for the future of this world.  She describes how watching the evening news causes her to cry out, “Lord, how long?”  And then, one Sunday, she sang with God’s people the words “for the darkness shall turn to dawning…and Christ’s great kingdom shall come on earth, the kingdom of love and light.” Here was here source of hope.  What she found was a way to know that our present and future life is not random. That which we hope in is greater than that which we fear.