JASON BOURNE is a character I love. The Bourne trilogy are not just movies to me, they’re visual reminders of a victorious way of living. No challenge is insurmountable to Jason Bourne and although I hear you say, “It’s just a movie,” I do contend; our world is often more make-believe than we’d think. Certainly this is true with fear.
At one point in the Bourne Supremacy (2004), Jason, who’s marred by constant headaches and blinding amnesia, begins running straight toward his unknown fears—those flashes of memory that halt him in his tracks.
The movie propagates a model where as he approaches his fears fearlessly he obliterates the fear, erasing the lack of memory—one by one he pieces his past together.
And the same reality works for us.
Running the Gauntlet
As the gauntlet is run and we challenge our fears—and this is done importantly not without fear—we find that we’ll often smash through the fear, even as if it never existed.
Of course, this takes courage and faith. Support might also be necessary.
Fear is not a bad thing, per se. Fear reveals us as ‘feeling’ creatures, capable of thinking and being touched by a world all-too-real at times. Some fears are important in that they warn us. But most of our deleterious fears are certainly fabrications—constructs from our pasts that haunt, deny, beg, steal and destroy.
Logic
Logic is a great fear smasher. In this, sometimes, we need to trust others’ insight into our problems—we take their insight as our truth. When we inflict logic over our fears most of the time they’ll disintegrate before our eyes. And yes, they’ll return so far as there is a little foothold for the fear to find a home in. So, we shut them away...
As soon as we deal with the fear—running its gauntlet with tenacity and completely following through—suddenly the fear disappears for good; certainly after we reflect on how pathetic it was.
Fear’s Place
We are not pathetic—only the fear is. Fears merely prove us as loving, feeling human beings capable of being touched mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It is good that we fear things. But there does need to be a balance.
Fear, finally, cannot be allowed to run its own rampant course, certainly where it controls us. We have the duty to ourselves and to our loved ones to deal with our fears—bringing them out into the open, and holding them to account—so we can finally live with much of what I call ‘accelerated hope,’ which is simply hope-on-tap. (More on this subsequently.)
Fears smashed; open doors to faith; hope is at home; love happens as a wonderful consequence. And peace is our place in the world. This is the circle of life.
© 2010 S. J. Wickham.
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