Facing Fear

Short meditations on what the Bible has to say about fear.

On a warm June day in 2024, I was on a weekend road trip.

It should have been a happy drive. My life was going well. I’d recently moved into a great neighborhood; I had a steady job; and, most importantly, I had friends and family members who deeply loved me. But during the drive, my phone kept pinging with the latest political news, and I felt an old familiar panic wash over me—a foreboding of the future. The news was a reminder that no matter what I did to build a fragile security, there were forces outside my control that could destroy it.

I’d been in survival mode for a long time.

Three years prior—almost to the day—my husband of thirty years told me he no longer wanted to be married. Fear and grief had been my constant companions. I thought I had worked through these feelings, but now here they were again. This time my fear was of a future in which people used the Christian faith to reject fellow members of the churning, troubled, flailing mass of humanity that God so loved the world to save.

I knew there wasn’t anything I could do to change events on the national stage. There had been very little I could do to change things on my personal stage. But I wanted to at least face my fear so it didn’t have the power to rule my life. Fear had made me want to live in a small, protected way so nothing bad could happen. I was beginning to understand that when I lived that way, fear grows.

Whenever fear has threatened to cripple me, to rob me of joy, I have turned to my faith.

I knew the Bible had many instances in which the phrase “Don’t be afraid” appears. There’s a popular rumor there are 365 of them—one for each day of the year. There aren’t quite that many, but the phrase does come up a lot. I found a writer who used software to do a search, and she found 145 places in the Bible where the phrases Do not be afraid, Don’t be anxious, Do not worry are used. (Thank you Milly of Milly’s Scribblings!)

The afternoon of my roadtrip I made a promise to look at each of these instances and examine them closely to try to understand what God—or God working through people—has to say to those facing overwhelming fear.

In the meditations to follow, I explore the 145 times where the Bible says “Don’t be afraid.”

Once I began this project, it took me months to post anything. I was afraid my secular friends and friends who have been harmed by religion would be turned off by my decision to write about the Bible. I was afraid friends who share my faith would wonder at an experiment by someone who is not a trained theologian. A dear, wise friend pointed out to me the irony of being afraid to launch a project about facing fear. That was the push I needed.

One of my faith heroes is the writer Madeleine L’Engle. She writes that as Christians, we live by revelation. I understand that to mean that when I approach the Bible, I ask the Creator God to open my heart to its Word, to where it meets me in my life now. I’m undertaking this project as a journey of discovery. I expect there will be times when I throw my hands up in confusion and even despair. But I’m going to do it anyway because I want to see what happens, to try to uncover where and how God might be accompanying me when I feel crippled by fear.

I was brought up Lutheran. We stake everything on God’s gift of grace through Jesus. I embark on this project not knowing where it will lead but hoping and praying Grace shows up. Thank you for showing up, too. ¹

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1. I use Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation of the Bible for quotations. Peterson, a scholar and pastor, translated the Old and New Testaments from the original Hebrew and Greek into modern language.