Quarantine fear

                                                    

There’s a disease on the move that’s even deadlier than Ebola.

It is invisible and highly contagious. It spreads with lightning speed and paralyzes its victims. It turns people, communities and nations against each other.

 

The disease is fear.
 

Anxiety and dread seem to permeate our nation — and many of our churches — at the moment. Threats abound: Ebola, ISIS, mindless violence, multiplying enemies. There’s a general sense that the world is spinning out of control and no one knows what to do about it — certainly not the institutions and experts we once looked to for guidance. 

“The Ebola crisis has aroused its own flavor of fear,” observes David Brooks of The New York Times. “It’s not the heart-pounding fear you might feel if you were running away from a bear or some distinct threat. It’s a sour, existential fear. It’s a fear you feel when the whole environment seems hostile, when the things that are supposed to keep you safe, like national borders and national authorities, seem porous and ineffective, when some menace is hard to understand.”


 

Some threats are real; others are the product of hysteria and saturation coverage of death and destruction. But we aren’t sure which is which. So we hunker down behind locked doors and dire predictions of worst-case scenarios.  

 

“There is no doubt that we will stop this [Ebola] outbreak, end the deaths, and, if done right, build the tools to prevent another large outbreak like this,” writes epidemiologist Larry Brilliant in The Wall Street Journal. “But it won’t be easy. Fear, panic and politics have gripped Americans, with the potential to do untold damage to our nation and the global economy. Our real enemy is a hybrid of the virus of Ebola and the virus of fear. As the famous World War II British poster reads, we need to keep calm and carry on.”

 

Easier said than done. Instant media spread facts and knowledge as well as rumors, misinformation and doubt. Many Americans now apparently fear anyone coming from Africa, even if they arrive from countries nowhere near the West African region affected by the Ebola outbreak. Some African immigrants who came to America years or decades ago report being ostracized or treated with suspicion since the Ebola scare began.

Eighteen Oklahoma high school students reportedly stayed away from class recently when their parents heard rumors on social media about three students who had just returned from a mission trip to Ethiopia, thousands of miles from the Ebola zone. “Our students were not exposed to Ebola,” Inola School Superintendent Kent Holbrook assured a local TV news reporter. “There was no person that was sick on the trip. There was no person sick [in] Ethiopia while they were there. There was no person [sick] on the plane.”

T.J. Helling, a local youth pastor who helped organize the mission trip, told the TV reporter the three students “did more in the last 10 days [during the mission trip] than most people do in their lifetime for other people. We need to remember that we’re here to encourage them and support them, not beat them down.”

I called First Baptist Church of Inola, where the three students attend, and talked to an adult member there. She said the fear in the community “shows that the world is lost. But our reaction to the fear shows Christ in us. I’m telling our students, ‘It’s easy to show love and grace to a kid in Ethiopia on a mission trip, but you need to show the same grace to the kids you see every day at school who are fearful of death. God may be building character in you.’

“The church can’t react in fear,” she added — at home or abroad.

Amen, sister. First Baptist of Inola is an example for us all in these uncertain days.

Fear is real. Don’t deny it or mock others who feel it, even when their fear seems irrational. That would make us hypocrites, because we all struggle with it. A friend of mine who did Southern Baptist mission work for many years in the Middle East currently mobilizes churches in the United States. He regularly interacts with Christians and church groups who fear all Muslims, fear everything happening in the Middle East, fear even the thought of going there — or befriending someone coming here from the Muslim world.


 

“I acknowledge the fear. It’s real; I get that,” said my friend. “But we’ve got to look at it through God’s eyes. If God can turn a terrorist named Saul into [the Apostle] Paul, He can turn some of the hearts of the people in ISIS. Jesus is the only solution.”

 

Jesus calls us to look at the world through His eyes — and to look at Him, not the dangers and troubles that terrify us. Matthew 14 describes the night He came to the disciples walking on water:
 

“When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.’ Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.’ And He said, ‘Come!’ And Peter got out of the boat, and walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But seeing the wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and took hold of him, and said to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’” (Matt. 14:26-31 NASB)

 

If bold, impetuous Peter, who walked with Christ Himself, experienced fear when He looked at the world, don’t be surprised if you do. Acknowledge it. Confess it to the Lord. Then look into His eyes, not at the fearful circumstances of our times. Step out of your safe, cramped boat. Befriend a lonely immigrant. Cross a border — and challenge some friends to go with you.

 

Jesus is already there, even in the darkest places, waiting for you to follow.

 

(To explore ways to follow Jesus into a dark world, visit http://imb.org/go/serving.aspx)

Darkness and light in the Middle East

                                                  

Sometimes the tears, the tragedies, the sheer horror of it all overwhelm Christian workers trying to help refugees fleeing war and terror in Syria and Iraq.

Jayson Keath,* a Christian strategy leader based in the Middle East, recently visited a Syrian refugee family now living in a country inundated with traumatized Syrians. One of the small children in the family was missing a finger — severed by a slammed car door as they rushed to escape the violence in their homeland. The parents had to knock the child unconscious so pursuing Syrian soldiers wouldn’t hear his screams of agony.

“It wasn’t so much their pain that gutted me,” Keath says. “It was the void of hope in every face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or felt darkness so strongly.”

Can the situation on the ground in Syria and northern Iraq get any worse? Much worse — as illustrated by ISIS (Islamic State) militants and their genocidal campaign of conquest across the region. The rise of ISIS amid the rubble of two failing states offers evidence of something larger, according to one despairing Arab observer.

“Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone,” wrote Hisham Melhem, a Lebanese journalist and Washington bureau chief of the Al-Arabiya satellite news network, in a recent commentary for Politico titled “The Barbarians Within our Gates.” 

“The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism — the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition — than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago,” Melhem asserted. “Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays — all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism. …  Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State?”

Melhem speaks for millions of disillusioned people across the Middle East and Northern Africa who feel caught between larger forces struggling for power. Is there any hope for them?

Yes, says Keath. And he wants Christians watching the struggle from outside the region to know the other side of the story. Hope that was hidden from many in earlier, quieter times is being introduced to people searching desperately for it now.

“The world is captivated by the crisis that has been generated by the movements of ISIS in northern Iraq, the plight of the Yazidis and other minorities,” Keath says. “The world is watching, and all they’re seeing is the advance of evil — sheer, utter evil. But there are two realities at work. There is the advance of evil. There is an evil one who is not only lurking but is actively trying to kill and maim and destroy and keep eyes blinded to the light of the Gospel and the glory of Christ.

 “But there’s also the advance of the Gospel. Everywhere we see these things happening, we see the Gospel advancing in ways that we did not imagine before.”

 As the visible Christian church in the Middle East faces threats, attacks and persecution from many directions, a new church is being born among Muslims deciding to follow Christ as Lord after seeing Him in dreams and visions, reading the Word of God and seeking out other believers.

And not just Muslims, adds Keath. Members of traditional Christian groups on the run from ISIS and other extremists in Syria are finding shelter, aid and friendship among evangelical believers in the region — and hearing the whole Gospel as they never have before.

 “Now they’re meeting in discipleship and growing,” he says. “Maybe God is moving in a way to lead those in the ancient church back to Christ, because that is happening. There are others — Orthodox from Syria and in another country bordering Syria that have come to faith in Jesus for the first time. There are multiple people groups that we’re talking about; there’s Sunni, there’s Shia, there’s Alawite, there’s Bedouin, there’s Orthodox, there’s Assyrians and Kurds. We can find believers now from all of these people groups that have come to faith as a result of the Syrian crisis. … Yes, the world needs to respond to the crisis, but there are enormous opportunities to confront people with the Gospel of Christ who have never been confronted with it before. All these people groups that I just listed, we never had access to them before [in Syria]. …

“The same thing is happening in Iraq right now. It’s not just the Yazidis and Christian minorities and other minorities; it’s the Sunni Muslims who are fleeing Mosul and other areas who are coming out by the hundreds of thousands. We have had no engagement of Iraqi Sunnis — and now we have an opportunity to do that. It’s not just the immediate response; it’s ‘Lord, what space are you creating for the Gospel to go forth, and how do we steward that opportunity?’”

With new opportunities come new and increasing risks across the region. But risks won’t stop the work God has begun.

 “We will not accept that we cannot engage in these countries,” Keath says. “It’s just a matter of what is our presence and what does that strategy look like? How do we continue to see Gospel penetration in these countries? Yes, there will be strategic shifts. [But] the Gospel is going to continue to advance.

 “God is moving; the nations are stirring. It’s going to happen. It may not involve us every time, but it’s going to happen. It is happening.”

 (To learn more and join what God is doing amid the turmoil of the Syrian refugee crisis, visit: http://namepeoples.imb.org/landing/4syria)

*Name changed