After reading John Pavlovitz’ book on hospitality and inclusion I started reading his blog and came across this recent post on “Fear as Religion.” “Somehow, what should be a hope-giving, life-breathing, joy-inducing lens for seeing and understanding the world and their humane place in it—has been reduced to a sanctified burglar alarm; forever forecasting doom, forever inciting panic, forever triggering outrage, forever putting their finger on the trigger, forever building fortified walls….And as a Christian, this makes me so very sad because it’s a million miles from the heart of the story: the one of a Maker who says: ““Do not fear.””
So how do we get into that space? For one, I would suggest that we need to live more closely in communities which encourage fearlessness, where we challenge each other to live and love in that way, to practice fearless hospitality, to lengthen the tables in our lives, to listen to the right voices clamoring for attention in our heads and hearts, to take small, and ever larger footsteps toward standing in the gap for those who are oppressed and poor and to hang on to each other as we do so and live with more yirah than pachad.