The Stream

What are you afraid of?

I’m sure each of us has been asked that question at some point in our lives, just as I’m sure we’ve all had many different answers to that question. Maybe your first thought is the easy to name fears and phobias like snakes or spiders, or even the common fear of the dark. Exterior fears, fears that you can point towards. Maybe your mind jumps past that to fears of abandonment, brokenness, or the unknown. Interior fears, fears that attack your very core. For me, I’ve always been afraid of failing. When I was a kid, it usually manifested as being afraid of failing a test or missing a shot or dropping the pass in the endzone. Now it still haunts some of the biggest decisions I have to make, and even when I know I’m making the right decision, that fear can still raise its ugly head—what if I mess this up?

Both Stephen King and J. K. Rowling seem to come to a similar conclusion in regards to their understanding of fear. In Rowling’s book Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, one of the creatures Harry encounters is called a Boggart. This creature is a shape-shifter with the habit of transforming into the thing a person fears most. For Harry it became the creature called a dementor, which drains all of the peace, hope and happiness away. Put another way, it became a physical representation of fear. Similarly, in King’s book It, the creature that attacks the children is a shape-shifter that appeared to each kid as the thing they feared most at the time. In both instances, these writers are implying that the greatest thing to fear is fear itself.

Scripture also speaks this albeit in a slightly different way. The most repeated commandment in the bible is to “not be afraid.” Fear consumes us, filling our mind and leaving no room for God. Fear separates us from our creator as we listen to the lie fear tells us: “there is no help for you.” So yes, the greatest thing one might fear is fear itself, but I believe that nugget of wisdom misses the point. We are still consumed by fear.

The story told by the video above came from a nineteenth century dervish teacher named Awad Afifi the Tunisian, referenced in the book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. Afifi tells the story of water as it falls down the side of a mountain becoming a stream. The stream then comes to the edge of a vast desert and must either continue disappearing into the desert or give itself to the wind—to surrender its fear. The water eventually decides to surrender, which allows it to cross the desert as a cloud, falling again as rain on the other side. 

In this story, the stream is afraid of losing itself—its identity in what it had become. It was afraid if it gave that up then that identity would be lost forever. In a way it was right, the identity of the stream plowing headfirst into the desert was lost, but it was only by giving that up that it could cross the desert and once more become a stream. I believe this teaches us two important things: the only way to move forward past fear is through surrender, and surrender leads to new life.

We spend so much of our time focused on fear. Either we are held firm in its grasp or we are consumed with overcoming it. What if instead of spending all of this time focusing on fear we instead looked towards God. What if instead of confronting our fears we surrender ourselves to God and “ride the winds'' over our own figurative desert to new life? Jesus shows us what it truly looks like to overcome fear as he surrendered himself to God’s purpose, a purpose that led him to the cross. His surrender culminated in resurrection, both for him and for all of us. Jesus showed us the new life that follows our surrender—a way forward over the desert.

So maybe the question isn’t “what are you afraid of,” maybe the question should instead become what is God asking you to surrender?