Ignoring a Fear-Based World

I was up until quite late last night read­ing about how var­i­ous groups use fear to try to manip­u­late every­thing from your mar­riage to the whole world order. Peo­ple are a lit­tle prone to fear. Enough bad things hap­pen to us to give fear a base, but it is out of pro­por­tion. Life is actu­ally a very secure process. Ever since the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus, there has been a way of liv­ing that totally excludes fear. In the words of John, “Per­fect love casts out fear.”
To live prac­tic­ing sac­ri­fi­cial love toward God, neigh­bor, and self is to elim­i­nate the fear upon which all other fears are based: the fear of the loss of the soul or the loss of the self. After Jesus was raised from the dead, he kept com­ing back to his fol­low­ers and telling them not to be afraid, for he had “over­come the world.” He had estab­lished the one action that reduces all other threats to mild annoy­ances.
Peo­ple that live as if this is the only world are eas­ily threat­ened. Their world can be taken from them so eas­ily. The major and minor polit­i­cal par­ties, the med­ical sys­tem, world gov­ern­ments, reli­gious ide­olo­gies, the liti­gious soci­ety — all use fear to manip­u­late and to gain either your alle­giance or what is left in your bank account. We have an elec­tronic media sys­tem that con­sid­ers fear-mongering as their call­ing. Then Hol­ly­weird (the appro­pri­ate term for a cer­tain sec­tion of movie-generating Cal­i­for­nia) fin­ishes out the course with dis­as­ter and hor­ror movies.
There is a trade­off for the lit­tle doses of adren­a­line gen­er­ated by a fear based world. We lose our con­fi­dence. We become afraid to live — to take the risks that really make us fully alive. Ignore the fear based world around you. You have a life to live. Fear is only one minor gauge on the dash­board of life. It is there to remind you of some lim­i­ta­tions (like grav­ity, speed, germs, and other nec­es­sary irri­ta­tions). Stop star­ing at it.