November 7, 2002

A Little Frightened . . . Never Scared

I don't care who you are or how macho you may be, chances are you get at least a little frightened from time to time. And if you're like me, your imagination allows you to get "allot of frightened" from time to time. But scared? I'd like to think I don't get scared any more.

Scared means I have somehow forgotten who and who's I am.

I get frightened about my children. Its amazing where the mind can go when trust slips away and all the ugly possibilities of this often evil world come flickering to life in our imaginations like so many bad network television shows. In many ways the threats are real - at least in the sense that it COULD happen. After all, abductions do occur. Accidents do happen. Sick people do live out there - some likely closer to the everyday of our life than we sometimes realize. But if you look at the "statistics of the thing" we all get along pretty well... i.e. we collectively log millions of hours between us without so much as a skinned knee.

But then some incident comes along like the recent D.C. area sniper murders and our imaginations find their feet again. I wonder how many of us here in Roanoke pondered the dilemma of the people living in northern Virginia as we pumped gas over the last several weeks and how many more of us felt at least a little antsy as we considered the distance between here and Washington. I know that when the incident occurred near Richmond my guard began to come up - even though I was at least 3 hours away from the nearest crime scene. As I strolled across the parking lot of a nearby Shell gas station one night some part of me actually said, "keep moving."

Can you say, "irrational fear?"

I had about as much chance of being hit by that sniper's bullet as I did a steam locomotive. But the thought was there. I did consider it. This, even though I had originally questioned the sense of those that refused to pump their own gas in the five million plus populated area of Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland. "What were their chances?" I bravely thought from about two hundred miles away. Considering my own eventual reaction, I suppose I would have been right there with them with my children indoors and the shades drawn.

Maybe such a survival response is natural to us, but it goes against the requirement of trust that is necessary in the development of a genuine faith - one that allows us to live a meaningful life free of debilitating fear. But it's a delicate balance. After all, the victims in Northern Virginia were doing just that - "trusting" - when they were mercilessly gunned down in the blink of an eye. Whether they were trusting fate, or God or "the odds" seems immaterial. Their choice to move forward cost them their lives. It's a painful reality that pulls hard at the imagination, regardless of our own perception of what the "chances might be."

Maybe your questions were the same as mine. How could a loving God allow that woman in the Home Depot parking lot to be standing there in conversation with her husband one moment and then fall as dead as the asphalt she was standing on, the next? It seems so horrific as to be unimaginable.

There is no easy answer.

There is no "answer" really.

God's passive will clearly allowed those two killers to be born and to move through the world unchecked until the fateful moment when the decision was made to pull that trigger yet again - this time with that young mother of two in the cross hairs. There's no doubt about it. If God does indeed exist, he did, at the very least, allow it to happen.

But were there chances for at least some of us (someone) to intervene somewhere along the way?

Yes there were.

But how could we have known that these two individuals would come to such a wretched end?

We couldn't. And we don't know what the next lost soul(s) might do, save the efforts of some concerned person somewhere willing and/or seeking to make a difference.

I wonder how many lives some of my old workmates at the Rescue Mission have indirectly saved. No small number I imagine. The same can likely be said for the thousands of volunteers that serve there as well. But such victories don't change the fact that lives continue to be lost to a sense of hopelessness that often leads to a desperate fatalism and even unpredictable madness.

But the lives lost in such circumstances are not entirely lost on the creation. The Spirit goes on to work his miracles of renewal and rebirth. Consider the words of a resident from a tough New York city neighborhood who lives just four blocks from where the World Trade Center and the balance of American innocence came thundering down last September:

"This is what remains: vulnerability . . . we all learned, that terrible morning that we could die reaching for a piece of toast at breakfast. Where I live that knowledge has made us more human. Even on streets noisy again with traffic, strangers say good morning. Men kiss their wives more, and hug their children, and walk with them to the Hudson to embrace the sunset . . . But no one talks with utter confidence about tomorrow . . ."

And maybe we shouldn't. At least in so far as what we expect the world to bring us on any given day. But that doesn't discount our trusting - that come what may, there is a God who is there for us and with us in ways we could never imagine. For we will continue to experience such perils, and to be "frightened" of the circumstances of them is to be perhaps all the more human for it. But where genuine faith is found, born of trust in the creator and an enduring compassion for one another, "fear" has no real foothold - only hope and confidence that after all the trials of this world have passed away there will be only the Glory of God's enduring love to be found.

So be a little frightened . . .

But never really scared.