Warding Off Fear

The gondola ride up a 6,000-foot Austrian mountain this past August with my son, his wife, and our three-year-old granddaughter triggered a vivid memory from some forty-plus years ago.

I was on my first ride up such a mountain with the same son. He was six or seven. I was respectively older. That time, though, we weren’t in an enclosed gondola, we were in a two-seater chair lift, and our feet were dangling quite freely above the treetops.

Neither of us knew exactly what we were in for. To ward off fear, I began talking. I talked about the wonder of being up so high, of the grand world God had created, spread far out below us. I talked all the way up the mountain.

But I was not talking to ward off his fear. I was talking to ward off mine.

I have acrophobia. Standing near a precipice makes me giddy. Even when I’m too close, say, to a high-rise apartment building window, gazing many stories below, the feeling comes on. I can hardly walk to my seat in the “nosebleed” section of a concert gallery. My knees wobble. My heart races.

It’s rather amazing, then, that I can ride in an airplane, which I have done repeatedly most of my adult life.

But I learned something in airplanes. I learned to look down at the immense, spreading world beneath the airplane. I learned to face my fear.

I say, “I learned” it, but on that recent experience in Austria with my family, the reverse trip down the mountain was in an open gondola with only a bar in front of the five of us for security. I felt that familiar stomach-clenching phobia and manually pulled a movable shield to enclose us. My husband protested, “I want to see!” I was a little miffed—doesn’t he remember my fear of heights? I reluctantly put the shield back in place.

Then I made myself look at the panorama far below, deep and wide. It was glorious. Why would I want to miss it? The shield was worn plexiglass and had dulled and contorted that view. I would have lost an exquisite vista and missed yet another opportunity to face my fear. Facing it took the fear away.

Facing fear does not always take it away. But it lends perspective. What am I afraid of? If my fear becomes a reality, what do I think will happen? In the first case, what I fear may not materialize. In the second, there is absolutely no way to predict what will happen if my fear does transpire. It’s my fear that paints scenarios, imagines resulting consequences—usually the worst ones.

I once had to face a fear that had far more potential dire consequences than my fear of heights.

In 1990, Trent was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer, and abruptly, in the space of a day, I had to look in the face of possible widowhood with five children still at home. It was a sobering, stomach-clenching view. Cancer loomed like an un-scalable mountain with the peak lost in mist.

What came to my mind in those early hours of receiving the worst news I could imagine were not the many biblical commands not to fear. What I remembered and pondered was one of the best reasons not to fear: “All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.” i Good? All things? As much as I tried to find a loophole in those words, I could not find one. “Good” means good and “all things” means nothing less than all the things that could transpire if the thing I feared became a reality. This thing.

I found, not immediate, miraculous, unfaltering peace, but comfort—which is a corollary to peace—to be far more of a safeguard against fear than a plexiglass shield or a security bar. I could make myself look at the vista which spread out daily with its unknowns and the uncertainty of what may lie over the next mountain of this illness. Every check-up for the following five years was an opportunity to look fear in the face.

That was thirty-five years ago. Have I “learned” it? What about the view at this point in my long life?

There are plenty of unknowns, which could make my knees wobble if I concentrate on the possibilities. My mind still has a way of conjuring up the worst ones.

Rather than numbly—or frantically—trying to ward off fears, I find a better way is to look them in the face, seek to gain perspective, and rest in the comforting promise of good in all things.

As it turned out, the guise of trying to ward off my young son’s fear—when it was really mine—was totally unnecessary. He did not inherit my acrophobia. True to his Austrian heritage by rite of birth, he became enamored of the mountains and has hiked and climbed many since, with stories I’m glad I don’t know till afterwards. I get giddy, just hearing them.

i Romans 8:28