by Ben Courson
An hour later Sean was fine.
I’m learning something valuable from him. Just don’t take fear so seriously.
A few weeks ago, I told the story about Sean and the jellyfish to an audience, and you could tell they were enjoying it by all the laughter. After the event broke up it was dark and I couldn’t see very well. But that didn’t stop me, and some of my friends, from grabbing our longboards for a little action. I went bombing down the hill, using my iPhone as a flashlight, and cranking up the EDM. I kept picking up more speed at each turn until I finally lost control and pitched myself onto the cement, tumbling head over heels and finding myself lying on the roadway with blood emerging from several different places on my body. My Squad took me to the emergency room, where I was fitted with a stylish cast and a sling for my arm.
When my friends surveyed the damage and realized I wasn’t dead, they smirked, “So, are you gonna laugh like Sean?”
Even though I was in a world of pain, and the blood was still fresh and abundant…I did.
Truth is, laughing really did make me feel better.
Though I still had to give my next talk wearing that sling.
Optmisfits take a whole lot more things a whole lot less seriously.
We defang the dark by laughing in its face.
As Sean’s brother Cam says, “I used to be afraid of the dark, but now the dark is afraid of me.” Or as Anakin learns in Matthew Stover’s Revenge of the Sith, “It is not the power of darkness that is to be feared, it is fear that gives power to the darkness.”
Maybe that is why you’ll find the phrase “fear not” more than two hundred times in the Bible. It is the most frequently repeated commandment in Scripture.
Fear is one of the most debilitating emotions you can experience. It will rob all your joy and confidence and happiness. It will make you respond in all kinds of unhealthy ways, stoking anger and bitterness, and keeping you from experiencing peace.
Just as laughing is good for your health, fear and stress and anger are slowly killing you.
Two of the most common diseases of modern life—the stomach ulcer and coronary thrombosis—are often the direct result of stress and fear. The way we think, doctors tell us, is the root of over 75 percent of the illnesses we experience. Until we get our way of thinking corrected, our reactions to life’s experiences may do more damage than the negative experiences themselves.
Laughter, the old saying goes, is the best medicine. Even before that old saying developed, Proverbs 17:22 told us that a merry heart is good medicine.
Are you getting your minimal daily requirement of mirth?
Cam once told me, “When fear visits the world, people tremble. And when fear visits the God in us, we crack up.”
Laughter is a sign of hopefulness. A sign that you aren’t taking the darkness more seriously than it deserves. I love to hear Cam give a talk, because he often must pause midway through his speeches because he can’t stop laughing at his own profound thoughts.
Cam is one of the least fearful people I’ve ever met.
And one of the most hopeful.
He takes life as it comes, without fear, and with tons of hope.
He taught me that any thought in my mind that doesn’t inspire hope isn’t from God. He never makes fun of me—no matter how much I might deserve it—and he always reminds me of how cool it is that I am created in God’s image. How can that not inspire hope?
Zero fear. That is our motto, and the motto of our entire Squad.
Which frees us up to live the adventure. Which we are doing. In spades. We believe that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. We are going to send it. Every time. Period. Even with people who don’t vibe with our tribe. Hey, they’ll come around.
The world was never changed by vanilla-flavored heroes.
The world is changed by those who dare and dare and dare and dare again—and who know the Great Enthusiasm.
I first got to know Cam when we rented one of those soccer-mom-style minivans for a road trip so that we could film some scenes for our TV show. Not long into the trip, one of the doors fell off. Being expert mechanics, we did the only sensible thing. We duct-taped it back on.
And on with the show.
Cam and I have never watched a movie together. We’ve been too busy living movies to watch them.
He’s the kind of guy who will gaze upon a Taco Bell burrito in the last glow of daylight as though it were a sacred object. Or pray for my healing when I have one of those skating mishaps. Or sometimes just sit quietly with me as we listen to the water plunge over a waterfall in the woods at night, basking in the love of God.
Once, on one of our woodland adventures, I had a scorpion jump onto my arm. My first thought was panic, but Cam just looked at me serenely and I could read the words in his expression: “That scorpion has zero power over you.” So, I brushed it off before it could kill me. Zero fear.
Our world is changed by those who refuse to be afraid. Martin Luther. Copernicus. Galileo. Socrates. Steve Jobs. Like them, we can throw back our heads and laugh uproariously at everything fear puts in our way.
“Perfect love,” writes the Apostle John, “casts out fear” (1 John 4:18 ESV).
“God has not given us,” chimes in the Apostle Paul, “a spirit of fear” (2 Timothy 1:7 CSB). It just isn’t who we are when we are children of God.
Love and fear are like matter and antimatter. They can’t exist in the same place. One cancels out the other.
Does this all sound too optimistic to you? Perhaps that is just because you haven’t tried it. Embracing this kind of attitude changes everything in your personal world. And that empowers you to change the world around you.
The boldest guy in the Old Testament was probably David. He was a fearsome warrior. He used potential fear as fuel. He was a guy who came face-to-face with an adversary who was literally a giant. A really big dude. Everyone else quaked in their boots, but he ran out to meet him and dispatched a single well-aimed stone from his slingshot and brought the giant down. David was mighty in battle, wielding his sword to slay hundreds of enemy combatants. He even tangled with lions and bears. He wrote in his journal: “I will not be afraid of tens of thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about” (Psalm 3:6 KJV).
Now we’re talking!
If you want to defeat your fears, you don’t have to do anything. You just need to let God love you, for when you recognize how deep His love goes, you’ll find that fear must vanish in the face of such overwhelming love.
Our part is to jump so that He can catch us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that the person who isn’t conquering some new fear every day has not learned the secret of life. We should always be doing the things that we are afraid to do.
In the Bible, God challenged people to not only face their fears, but to faith their fears.
What was the prophet Isaiah most afraid of? Public speaking. He had no confidence in his power to craft the right words and deliver them with style. And what did God call him to do? Preach. And to make it even more uncomfortable, He once even asked him to preach naked. God asked him to bare his soul, and to bare his body while he was at it. This man with minimal self-confidence ended up writing the book of the Bible that most scholars consider one of the most beautiful and poetic. But first he had to face the fear.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were three Hebrew teenagers who had been displaced by the Babylonian captivity. A very long way from their home they didn’t do the expected thing. They didn’t try to fit in with the customs of the land where they now found themselves. They were not men of convenience, but men of conviction. When they were cast into a fiery furnace for refusing to bend the knee to the religious expectations of a pagan king, they did not shrink from the flames. And the God who is a consuming fire—who never burns what we are, but only what we are not—redeemed them from their fiery tribulation. The flames did not burn them. The flames forged them. In the midst of the attempted roasti
ng they lifted their voices to praise God. I’m willing to bet that they had a good chuckle at the whole situation.
Daniel was another fearless figure. When he was tossed into a den of lions as punishment for praying to the One True God, he just lay down and took a nap among those ferocious felines. Zero fear. Sure deliverance. Daniel was so fearless that he could sleep in a lion’s den even though the king was so scared that he couldn’t fall asleep in a palace!
Speaking of naps, can you and I be like Jesus, who slept soundly in a boat that was being tossed about wildly by the churning waves? His disciples were in a panic.
Jesus was taking a nap.
When a group of 50 people over the age of 90 were asked what they would do differently if they could live their lives all over again from the start, one of the most common answers was: I wish I had taken more risks.
When I’m older I don’t want to be found complaining about the cramps I got from playing bingo or shuffleboard. I want to be barreling down the hill on my longboard, even if I’ve got a touch of arthritis.
I want to be like Yoda, warding off Count Dooku with my geezer stick at nine hundred years old.
I want to be like Caleb, a biblical character who didn’t let age slow him down. He didn’t retire at a beachside condo in Galilee. Instead, at age 85, he was fighting the Anakim giants. He may have had snow on his rooftop, but he still had fire in his furnace.
I want to be like my grandfather. He was a little crazy, but in the best possible way. I remember visiting my grandparents in their home in the woods when I was a kid. I was out in the yard with my grandma and everything was pretty quiet except for the sound of the birds singing. Suddenly, there was the loud rasping sound of an engine revving up. I must have flinched, because Grandma said, “Don’t worry. It’s just your grandfather.”
Sure enough, my grandpa came roaring down the hill on his dirt bike. He picked up speed as he got closer, went up a little ramp he had built, and proceeded to soar over the top of my mom’s VW van. Without a word he turned the bike around and rode away.
If my back is a little sore when I hit 75 years old, I want it to be because I just tried a double backflip on my dirt bike.
I want to be like the palm tree in Psalm 92, which bears fruit into old age. And its fruit only gets sweeter as it gets older.
In the meantime, I am busy undertaking the quest God has given me. I want to be Luke Skywalker, Katniss Everdeen, Achilles, and Frodo all rolled into one.
More than that, I want to be like Jesus.
Jesus knew what was coming as He slowly made His way to the cross. He could have adjusted His message to make folks more comfortable with it, or forged some helpful alliances with the religious establishment, or hired a group of bodyguards to replace the cowardly disciples. But Jesus showed no fear. Sure, there was a moment of hesitation in Gethsemane, but He knew what needed to be done. And He did it.
I want be like Him.
I want to do something so scary that if God’s not in it, I am doomed to fail. Great things never happen in the comfort zones.
So, as I walk through the valley of the shadow I will fear no evil.
I’ll live even if the jellyfish stings me. I’ll brush off the scorpions. I’ll send fear scampering away in terror.
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MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN
During the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was a respected general, so respected that he would eventually become president of the United States. His success as a military leader was founded upon his fearlessness.
One day he climbed alone to the top of a mountain to scout the terrain. But what he saw made his heart beat faster. There were thousands of enemy troops led by General Harrison, and they were preparing for an imminent attack. A wave of fear passed over him.
As his mind raced through the possibilities of how to respond to this overwhelming force, he watched Harrison gather his soldiers into formation…and then begin a hasty retreat. Evidently the very sight of Grant had struck fear into his opposition.
Grant learned something that day that he would never forget: Every one of his adversaries “knows my name, and they are more afraid of me than I am of them.”
The enemy of our souls, that wily snake, is more afraid of you than you are of him. For “greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4 KJV).
Know your God.
And have no fear.
Know your limitations.
And then defy them.
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THE REBEL JESUS
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild?
Not so much. He overturned the tables of orthodoxy, disrupted the religious system and its ceremonies, taught subversive ideas, and questioned the authority of those who were in power.
One man pitted against the assembled might of Jewish orthodoxy.
Everything He did was a slap in the face of the System.
Everything He did was a deliberate act against Religion.
He talked to women…even prostitutes. That just wasn’t done. What about your reputation, Jesus? What will people think?
He ignored the nitpicky regulations of Sabbath—rubbing grain between His hands on the holy day, therefore “harvesting” illegally. What about your reputation, Jesus? What will people think?
He walked into the temple area and angrily overturned the tables at which the moneychangers sat; they were just trying to keep the sacrificial system going according to the rules. What about your reputation, Jesus? What will people think?
He didn’t care what people thought. Especially what the Pharisees thought.
The fact that some people addressed Him as “Rabboni” probably indicates that Jesus was very possibly a Pharisee Himself, the group of orthodox Jewish leaders who took their faith seriously, but focused more on the outer aspects of religious observance than on having a friendship with Abba. They knew the Bible, but they didn’t know God.
If that is true, it means that Jesus was blowing up the System from the inside.
Talk about a misfit. Jesus was definitely someone who was poorly adapted to His environment. He was intent on overturning that environment. And showing us a new way.
The System is the world as we know it.
The System is religion as we know it.
Diagnosis: The System is broken.
Therefore, torching the System is the only sensible response. Refusing to fit in is the only reasonable reply.
Jesus was killed by the System.
He made everyone uncomfortable—the Roman authorities, the religious Jews, the conditioned masses. He simply didn’t fit in. He subverted the very “truths” that the Romans and the Jews were depending on.
He ignored the Laws.
Jesus co-opted the very words that the Romans used for their “peace through strength” message, and offered His own kind of Good News. He waged war through love, forgiveness, and weakness. He stood unafraid before the leaders of the greatest kingdom on earth (the Roman Empire) and said that His only allegiance was to a Kingdom that they could not see.
So, they killed Him. They colluded to take His life, believing that would be the end of His single-minded rebellion against the System.
But burning books and killing rebels only fans the flames.
You can’t kill Truth.
And Jesus rose like the phoenix out of those flames.
Jesus is kind of like Sonic the Hedgehog. The Sega system has become extinct, but Sonic remains indestructible. He outlives it, because he is bigger than any system.
The System that killed Jesus is still with us. It will try to brainwash us into believing that the System is reality.
In the classic film The Matrix, Neo was offered the option of swallowing the blue pill and simply accepting the illusions he saw around him as reality, thereby living a life of placid conformity. Or, if he swallowed the red pill he would see things for what they really are.
The Truth.
As Cam once said, “The System is far less an entity to des
troy than an illusion to unsee. What keeps the System powerful is the illusion of its power that is engrained in the hearts of the ones whom it seeks to oppress.”
Too many Christians have been satisfied with adapting to the System. Of finding a way to comfortably coexist with it.
But a child of God will not accept that option.
We will join the rebellion led by the rebel Jesus.
We take up the weapons of love and wonder to wage a fierce rebellion against hopelessness.
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WHAT I LIKE ABOUT RELIGION
Not much.
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WHAT I DON’T LIKE ABOUT RELIGION
Pretty much everything.
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WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT RELIGION