Once the Story’s Been Told

What am I afraid of? Today, I’m writing down my fears. There are, I’ve realized, only a few things I have to write down—a much smaller list than just a couple years ago. But though the list is much shorter than I’d anticipated, what is still there is big. Really big.

Why, you might be wondering, am I writing this down? Why would I put any kind of focus on this? But writing this down is an interesting exercise, because how we handle our deepest, darkest, most shameful fears has a lot to say about how we handle the world and our interaction with people. Fears are an interesting thing. When it comes to our darkest ones, we are far more apt to bury and try to ignore them than to look them in the face. We are afraid of what we will really see, or more truthfully, what our fears will say to us and make us believe about ourselves. In this, we fail to realize that our fears speak most clearly when we believe we’re not listening. And unknowingly, we begin to respond to the world out of this—out of our wounded selves, as I’ve heard it described.

I have a little brother who is seven. My little brother is a sensitive kid and fairly shy, and in his even younger days he had a strange habit. In public, be it at church or just hanging out with family, if he became embarrassed by something or really shy around a stranger, he would put his hands over his face. To Nicolas, this made all the world disappear. It solved his problem, making it all go away. There’s a flaw in this logic, though. A flaw that any of us can see. Putting his hands over his face made the world disappear to Nicolas, but in truth nothing actually disappeared even if Nicolas believed it did, and not only did it not disappear, but it made his embarrassment all the more noticeable (and humorous) to the rest of us. Fear is not so unlike this. The more we realize fear is there but try to ignore it and pretend it’s not, the more others around us will notice it. And yet, so many of us play that same silly game like my brother. We still try to act as if it’s not there, and then it begins to become the way through which we see the world.

Even more remarkable, though, is how many of us play the game. Our fear is noticeable to all, but it is interesting who realizes what it is and who doesn’t. Fear not only blinds us to ourselves, but it also blinds us to how we accurately understand those around us. If I put my hands over my face to hide my embarrassment, I don’t see anyone or anything else. But what else I don’t see is how many other people have their hands in front of their faces, too. We believe, however, that we can see. We stumble around in the darkness of our own chosen ignorance and for a while we manage to get to where we think we’re going. But there are those who can see it for what it is, those who have once lived with their hands over their faces but have gained the freedom to remove them.

A number of weeks ago I wrote about the worry of telling my story, specifically as part of a give and take in my newly building friendship with the campus chaplain where I attend school. Recently, she got to learn my story. I was afraid for her to know it, but in the end, I believed I could trust her. And in the end, of course, I was right. But now what? My story, I’m sad to say, is embarrassing for me. It is not the story of alcoholism or a wild and crazy life that was radically changed in my darkest moments—all those stories that our American (Christian) culture has unfortunately labeled as Romantically (as in the 18th century movement) tragic and something we would frame and put up on the wall if it were artwork. Don’t believe me? Just think about it—one responds very differently to someone who struggles with alcoholism than, say, someone who struggles with a pornography addiction.

Now, I’m left with the afterward. It is funny that in movies, the climax is the final point of the explosion of the story. The resolution is that moment afterward when we are reassured that it will be all right and then the movie ends, but in reality, life keeps going and what do we do once the story’s been told? How we answer this question is what really matters. And so my fears begin to build. My past is seeping into the present and all the while I’m fighting a battle that initially just wants me to put my hands over my eyes, but that in the end is asking me to actually look my fear in the face.

Ultimately, fear is a lie. It’s a powerful lie that grips us in our weakest places and whispers sweet shame in our ears. And the weirdest part about it is when we realize it’s a lie but can’t quite figure out how to stop believing it. And this is where it is integral to know that while fear is not necessarily an addiction, the dismembering of it is not a whole lot different. When someone is addicted to eating, it is not, at the core, the food that is the problem, and to simply take away the food will solve nothing. In taking away the food, we are exposing a hole it is filling, and something must take its place, because we are inherently taught (or perhaps designed) to fill the holes in our lives, and we will find any means to do it. When we realize our fear is not telling us the truth, and in fact is feeding us bitter deceit, knowing that is not the end of the road. We must be given the truth to fill the emptiness where the lie was.

In the end, fear is not something to be dwelt upon. It is a wound to be healed and a lie (or lies) to be exposed and deflated and replaced with truth, real Truth. We look at our fears not to feed them, but to see them for what they really are, to see that the shame they cause us is the biggest lie of them all and to begin the journey that exposes the truth that Jesus Christ loves us at all moments of our lives, and that our fears do not make us who we are, and they never did.