Facing Fear – Sunday, August 31, 1980
Life is a high-risk endeavor. The stakes are enormous. Utter happiness or total heartbreak often depend on a mere difference in a step, a turn of the head, an off-hand decision. Misery may suddenly break upon our heads out of nowhere. Oh, we may put on shows of confidence for one another, occasional acts of bravado, but it is only the untruthful who never admit to fear. The rest of us are always somewhere between total security and fearful anxiety.
And when at times we are faced with uncertainty, frightened feelings might arise. A full stomach may not please us today if we are not sure of tomorrow’s meal. But even in times of relative security, we can never forget how frail is the heart that beats in the person we love most, how limited our time together. We can never forget in our times of relative confidence how little we know, how prone to error. Pascal said, “Man is but a reed—the weakest thing in nature. . . It is not necessary that the whole universe should arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him.”1 But if life does have its panicky moments, how do we survive them?
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line, it will take your confidence. You must do the thing you cannot do.”2
When we flee those things which cause us fear we learn to shrink from life, always waiting for the blow. We end up with a thousand troubles—most of them imaginary. But when we face our fears head-on, a remarkable thing happens. Because we don’t shrink, our fears do. They become manageable, less horrible. In fact, they may become our schoolmasters, teaching us in a marvelous way, our own strengths, our resiliency, our ability to look anything in the face and say, “I will not let this beat me.”
Bit by bit as we face our fears instead of flee before them, we learn that “the only real fear,” as another Roosevelt said, “is fear itself.”3
1 You Can See Forever, compiled by Caesar Johnson, The C.R Gibson Co., pg. 9.
2 Ibid, pg. 14.
3 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address – March 4, 1933. New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, ed. by H.L. Mencken, p. 395, Alfred A. Knopfs publisher, New York, 1966.
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August 31, 1980
Broadcast Number 2,663