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It takes a lot of courage to be a human being. With so much going on around the world, and equally inside of us, the days can sometimes get heavy. Fears and anxieties and stresses are things we all experience, and sometimes those pieces fill us so much that they begin to rob us of our joy, and our hope. There are a few times within the gospels where Jesus speaks to such experience. “Do not be afraid. Just believe,” he says. A nice sentiment, I think. But it always struck me as odd, this statement to “just believe.” Believe what? Jesus does not say. Apparently, though, those are the two choices - be afraid or believe.
When we discover that we are not in control of everything, we have a choice, I guess. We can fear, or allow our fears and anxieties to consume us, or we can believe. We can panic and fall overboard or we can ride out the storm. We can despair or we can wait, and maybe for a very long time, for a sense of stability to return. We can be afraid or we can believe.
In our lives, I think we discover that this is almost never an “either/or” type thing. I’ve never come across anyone who has the ability to simply “believe” all the time, but I do know how both fear and belief feel, and that there is a difference between the two.
Fear is like a small cell with no air in it and no light. It is suffocating inside there, and dark. There is no room to turn around inside it. You can only face in one direction, but that doesn’t really matter much because you cannot see anyway. There is no future in that cell of fear. Everything is over and everything is past. When you are locked up like that, tomorrow is as far away as the light.
Belief is something else altogether, although I think we often get confused as to what belief really is. It is not a well-built nest, or a well-defended castle. Perhaps it is more like a rope bridge over the Grand Canyon. It’s sturdy enough, but it is also constantly swinging back and forth. There’s plenty of light and plenty of air, but there is also very little to hang onto.
At some point, we have to believe in the bridge more than we believe in the massive hole in the ground. And perhaps one of the greatest gifts is that we don’t have to believe all on our own. There are others to believe it with us, and even some to believe it for us when our own belief wears thin. Those people have crossed the bridge ahead of us and are waiting for us on the other side. You can talk to them if you like, as you step into the air, putting one foot ahead of the other. That’s all it really takes - just that: just one step at a time, slowly and surely, waving in the wind.
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