Not all fears are easily dealt with.

Some of our fears are imagined. But some are not. How do we deal our fears when the nightmare is not imagined but a reality?’

Sometimes we can overcome a real fear by playing off another one against it.

From time to time I’ve found myself in frightening situations – when the reality is a nightmare – and I’ve been scared to death to have to deal with the reality.

And now and again l’ve found playing off my fear of what would happen if I didn’t get involved – against my fear of what would happen if I did – actually broke the deadlock, and freed me from my fear of getting involved with the situation!

One night I was walking down the street and came across a man being attacked by a couple of hoods, who were stabbing him with the jagged shards of a broken bottle. His face was already covered in blood. And the hands he used to protect his face were already badly cut and bleeding. I thought, if someone doesn’t do something soon, this chap could be cut to pieces.

I looked up and down the street. But no one else was around. I knew I it was up to me to do something myself; but, I must confess, I was tempted to just to walk on by. To pretend that I hadn’t seen anything warranting my attention, let alone my intervention. I was afraid, terribly afraid, and my fear was well founded. It had a strong basis in fact. There were two men across the road trying to kill someone, and if I tried to help him, chances were that I could be killed too. After all, there were two of them; and only one of me. They looked like street fighters; and I looked like the wimp that I was. I had no weapon, and wouldn’t know how to use one if I had one; and they had shards of sharp glass, that they wielded as wickedly as the grim reaper himself might have swung his scythe.

Fear such as this should not be dismissed. Because fears based on reality act as a basic reality tests for our intentions. Sometimes it is better to run away and fight another day, than to die for nothing at all. However, this was not one of those times. This time someone’s life was at stake. And watching the man get cut to pieces, callously, from a safe distance, and not lift a finger to help him, was a far more terrifying prospect for me than trying to help him. So I wrapped the tattered rags of my makeshift courage around me, and, with trembling hands, wobbly knees, and a heart ringing like an alarm bell, crossed the road to intervene in the fight.

I didn’t rush over and try to crash tackle the assailants. That only ever works in the movies. And even then it doesn’t work all the time. I simply walked to within ten metres of the melee, propped, and said from a safe distance the most inoffensive thing I could think of the time, which was, “G’ Day.” The ant-agonists immediately turned I my direction. Now I had their attention I tried to distract them from further hurting their victim. But the trick was to do it without them harming me instead. So I said to them, in as friendly a tone as I could muster, “Can I help you?” The aggressors looked at one another, then at me, and laughed. They thought it was a big bloody joke. “Does it look like we need any help?” they asked facetiously. “No.” I said very carefully. “It doesn’t look like you need any help. But, it looks like he might need some help. What d’you reckon?” By now they had stopped stabbing their prey, and, in answer to my question, shrugged their shoulders, and said, “Well you help him then!”

With that, they walked off, and left me to care for the mutilated man on the side of the road. He was seriously injured, but at least he was alive. And so was I.

I’ve intervened in many violent situations in my life. Sometimes I’ve been beaten up so badly I’ve had to be hospitalised. One time I had to be rushed in for emergency surgery. But that was when I was younger, and intervened more aggressively, and unconsciously escalated the spiral of violence in the situation. Now I’m older, I’m a little wiser. These days I am very wary about intervening. And when I do, I am very careful to do it as peacefully as I possibly can. My fear doesn’t usually stop me. But it slows me down. Which is what fear ought to do. Not stop us. But slow us down. And make us more careful about the way we go about getting involved with people.[1]

Which is all very well. But, the fact is, that these days I am more fearful than I have ever been in my life before. And my fearfulness actually stops me from getting involved with people more often than I would like to admit to others, or even to myself. And my faith – which has always been the light of my life – is often not adequate in itself to help me overcome my dreadful sense of fear.
I can relate to the final words in the Gospel of Mark, which says of the followers of Christ, that after all that they had said and done, “they were (still) afraid.” [2]

Which isn’t really surprising, since anyone who plays the fear of ‘one who can kill the soul’, off against one ‘who can kill the body,’ [3] is still going to be fearful.