Fear says - "What if..."
Faith says - "Even if..."
Those two lines have followed me for over twenty-five years.
I first ran into the idea in a book from the late 80s by Susan Jeffers called 'Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway', which you hardly need to read once you have read the cover... 😁
After that the two voices kept turning up, again and again, through some fifteen years of tour de force into personal development, coaching, therapy, change models, hypnosis and in books, on courses and in rooms with all sorts of people sitting in a circle, singing bowls and gongs and bongs and what have you - and they hit something or other in me every single time.
And that without me once hearing what the word Faith was actually pointing at, namely the deepest belonging a human being can have. Of course I didn't. I hadn't found it yet.
But they resonated anyway, those two sentences. The way something true does, long before you know where it comes from.
And the two voices are busy these days.
I don't know if you have noticed.
Turn on the news on a perfectly ordinary evening, and count them.
What if the climate tips over. What if the war comes here. What if AI takes your job, and what if it then takes the rest. What if there is a new pandemic, what if the economy crashes, what if the power goes out, what if the hackers ruin the water, what if the fjords die, and have you by the way remembered water and canned food for three days, what if you haven't? 🤓
Some of it is serious enough, that is not the point. But notice that the sentence always begins the same way, and that it never ends.
We are served the future as a threat - morning, noon and night. And a human being cannot live inside "what if" for years without it moving in and settling as a permanent fixture in the human being himself.
And when the evening is over, you switch off the Man on TV and all his "What if" Experts™, who have been wheeled out in a row in there, and go to bed.
And there in the dark the small What Ifs lie waiting - the ones that are actually much bigger than the big ones...
What if I lose my job. What if she leaves. What if the doctor calls with the wrong answer. What if I can't pay. What if the deal doesn't come through. What if I never work out what I am here to do. What if I never have children. Or a husband.
Life tests us. ALL of us. Me too - I am not writing this from the other side of anything at all, and I know perfectly well what it is to be the man lying awake at three in the morning doing the sums on everything... I have been there many times. FAR too many times.
Maybe you have too. Or maybe you are there right now.
So let me tell you a story that I need to hear myself every now and then.
It goes something like this.
Once upon a time there was a garden.
It lay on a slope just outside Jerusalem, on the other side of a brook, and it was full of old olive trees - so old and gnarled that they looked like someone who had seen it all before.
The garden was called Gethsemane - so now some of you know where we are. It means oil press, the place where you lay the fruit under a heavy stone and press until the good runs out.
Hold on to that name.
It was night, and the moon was full, because it was Passover, and at Passover the moon is always full.
Down the road from the city came twelve men walking. They had just risen from the table where they had eaten the Passover meal together, and at the end they had sung the old hymn of praise, the one their fathers and their fathers' fathers and so on had sung on that very evening, year after year.
Eleven of them did not know what kind of night it was.
The twelfth knew. He had even told them, more than once, but they had not heard it, the way you do not hear what you cannot bear - that this was the last time they would walk together like this.
When they reached the garden, he asked eight of them to sit down, and took his three closest friends a little further in among the trees.
In there he said something they had never heard him say before.
And those three had seen it all. They had sat in the boat when he made the storm lie down with a couple of words. They had watched him feed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish. They had stood on the mountain and seen his face shine like the sun. And they had stood at the tomb when he called a dead man out into the light.
And now that same man said - "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me."
And so they did. Of course they did.
Then he went a stone's throw further, until he was alone. There he fell to the ground with his face turned down against it and prayed the words -
"My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by."
Let me explain that sentence to you in plain language.
'The cup' is his word for everything that is waiting for him in a few hours - if you know the story, you know what it is - the betrayal, the lashes, the torment, the humiliation, the crown of thorns, the cross. He knows exactly what is coming. And "if it is possible" simply means - "Father, if there is another way, let me take it."
He asked to be spared. He was so afraid that the sweat fell from him like drops of blood. And I know we have been told him composed, exalted and stoic, I do know that - but that is what it says.
And think for a moment about who it is lying there. For two thousand years he has been held up as the one human being who lived life completely right - the best of us - and for those of us who believe, far more than that. And even he was afraid.
So if you have been walking around thinking that your fear means there is something wrong with you, you are at least in good company.
When he came back to his friends, they were asleep. All three.
He woke them and asked whether they could not keep watch with him for even an hour, and then he went in among the trees again - and now prick up your ears, because the second time he prays ALMOST the same thing, except for one small word that is easy to miss.
When he was alone, he prayed - "My Father, if it is NOT possible for this cup to pass me by, then your will be done."
Did you catch it?
Let me help you with the difference those few words make -
The first time he says - "if it is possible, let me be spared."
In other words. If there is an easier way than this one, I would very much rather take that.
That is Fear speaking. In him too.
The second time he says - "and if it is not possible, if this is the only way, and it goes straight through everything I am afraid of, then I will walk it anyway. Then it is your will that shall be done, and not mine. I do not know how I will get through it, but I know who I am walking with."
That is Faith answering.
Now you may be thinking that something big must have happened between the two prayers. That heaven had opened, or that he was given a sign, or at the very least a small breath of a message - "it'll be fine, good luck".
It didn't.
No answer came. His friends had fallen asleep again, and down in the valley you could now see torches on their way up towards the garden - a long line of them, in fact, carried by men with swords and clubs. Everything he feared was still on its way, and now he could even see it coming.
The old text says that an angel came to him. And the first time you read that, most of us probably think - THERE WE GO. YES PLEASE. SAVED AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR. KNEW IT!
But the angel did not take him away from there. It gave him strength to stay.
So try to picture it. The night was the same. The torches were the same, only closer. His friends were still asleep, and heaven still said nothing. Not so much as a single leaf had moved in the whole garden.
The only thing that had moved was him.
In the first prayer everything hangs on how it goes. His calm and his courage depend on whether he is allowed to escape - and that is mostly how we are ourselves - "I will be calm, as long as I know FIRST that it ends well."
In the second prayer he has let go of that. He has not been given the slightest promise, and he is still afraid, but he has decided who he is, and who he belongs to, however it goes.
And that shift moves a whole human being. You and me too.
But back to the story.
He got up, woke his friends for the last time and walked out to meet the men with the torches himself.
He was not fetched. He went. Freely.
So. Do you remember what the garden was called? 'The oil press'. The place where you lay the fruit under a heavy stone and press until the good runs out.
That was the place where he was pressed harder than any human being has been, before or since. And what came out of him was not bitterness, and it was not a "why me".
It was an unconditional yes.
And that is the whole difference.
The fear in us never finishes asking - because behind every single "what if" you get an answer to, a new one is standing there waiting. The torches can be called climate or war or a message from the doctor, your partner or the bank - it is the same night.
And that can be hard to see once fear has got hold of you. But try to catch sight of this anyway.
The faith in us is not stupid. It can see the torches too. It actually asks all the same questions as fear - it has just answered every one of them at once.
And notice that even he - even Jesus - began with the first prayer. In fear. But being afraid is not the same as lacking faith, or there would have been no sweat on the ground in that garden.
So we waver, you and I, and we will do it again tomorrow, at the latest when the television is switched on.
But every time - every single time - life tests us, it is the same test, and the answer has not changed in two thousand years.
Yes.
Even if.
Your will be done.
