Fear, Dangerous Places, and Living Above It All - Reagan Schrock - Conspiracy Theories

So it was a situation I had never pictured myself being in. It was August 2016, and I found myself in an active war zone in northern Iraq, city of Sinjar. It had been controlled by the Islamic State, ISIS, for over a year and a half. The military had just cleared the area a few months prior.

Debris everywhere, bombed out buildings, active fighting, landmines, unexploded ordnance everywhere. And the one morning we went up to one of the sections of the front line, which basically they use giant earth-moving equipment to build a barrier. It's about 10 feet high of earth, and then all along it are machine gun nests and artillery, things like that. And then from there out was no man's land. We went up to the one section, and the commander said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, we can't come here. No, no, ISIS just attacked us a few hours ago. They just attacked this position. You can't get any closer."

So no problem. So we went down the line about a quarter mile to another section of the front line. They welcomed us in, had tea, and we're sitting in what used to be an ISIS house there in their living room, just drinking tea with some of these. It was with one of the aid groups over there had a meeting with one of the generals there.

So we walk up to the top, the rooftop of the house, and you could look out across the plain, and you could see ISIS houses out there, not very far away, a quarter mile maybe. And they were very quiet. There was no movement on that side of the line, kind of like on our side. Everybody was just kind of not really sure what was going to happen.

And then we walked down to the house, went into the field next to it. And again, you can still, I mean, you can see that they're just like right over there. And we came up on some of the mass graves where ISIS had exterminated people that didn't fit with their ideology. And only two people had survived out of that group. They had rounded all these people up. And it was horrific. It was terrifying. It was earth-shattering for my life. And he said, "This is just one of many mass graves around this city," which is just one city out of dozens that the Islamic State had taken over at that point.

And we get back into the city center, and we were working on cleaning up some houses and things. And some little children, were very energetic, didn't know, had lots of time on their hands. And there were civilians in the city at the time. And so they're like, "Oh, come, come, come, come with us. We want to show you something." And so I kind of wandered off and followed them. They go along this street where the buildings have been blown up, and there's debris everywhere, and power lines are down. There was no power grid or anything, no internet, no cell service. And we're walking along. It hadn't been cleared for landmines, which I did not know until after the fact, which is a good thing I didn't know until after the fact.

And so we're walking along this broken street for about half a block, and there's the remains of a house. The top half had been blown off. And it was a pretty nice house from what we could see. We climbed up the stairs, go to what used to be the second floor, which is now the roof. And these little children are like, "Come, come, come. Here, look." And here was an unexploded mortar just sitting on this house.

I was like, "Wow, that's interesting." And so I go up kind of close, and I'm looking at it, and they're like got really worried. I go, "No, no, no, no, don't get close." They go, "Boom." And then they walked over to the next section. See, here's another one.

And it deeply impacted me that this is what was literally in these children's backyard. And this is what they do for entertainment. They go and find some unexploded ordnance and say, "Wow, check this out. Here's this interesting thing."

Experiences like that deeply impact us and deeply reorient our lives. And one of the things I've had to really wrestle with is what do we do with fear, uncertainty, chaos, dangerous places? How do we live above all of that? And it's been a journey for me the last number of years working through this. And maybe I'll share some more of my story, how I actually ended up in that type of situation.

And what does that mean? And what lessons can we learn from those things? I don't have all the answers, but God has allowed me to live a slightly unusual life, I guess I could say. Most of you probably know me through YouTube videos and about this perspectives. I'm also full-time with a nonprofit that works in Iraq, which is the reason I was there. I've been there eight times. We were just there a few weeks ago.

And almost always, it's nothing dramatic like that at all. But sometimes you do encounter things like that that take life and put it into crystal clear focus. And it brings you back to yourself to reorient. Why am I here? Who am I? Why do I take these risks? What does following Jesus in really difficult places look like? What do we do with these things?

So we're going to plow into this topic. It's adapted from a sermon I did at my own church right after we were allowed to start having services again during the pandemic last year. Fear, dangerous places, and living above it all.

Fear is probably one of the most universal of human experiences. We've all been there. We all know what it feels like.

We all battle this, but it's really interesting because entire industries are built around the topic of fear. But it's really kind of challenging. What do we nail down? What is actual fear? If I were to ask you for a definition, what does it look like? What causes fear? It varies so much from person to person.

So I recently encountered a story that I thought really encapsulated this. So anybody know what this is?

Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls, yes. Niagara Falls is an indescribably massive set of waterfalls on the border of the United States and Canada. The water cascades over 160 feet to the bottom, landing with a combined force of over 2,500 tons. Nearly 700,000 gallons of water flows over this falls every second.

It's been the location of many daring showmen. In the 1800s, they had this thing where I wish I could find better pictures of this. But yeah, in the 1800s, they would string up these tight ropes, and then they would walk across. And if the first guy did it way back in the 1800s, and then well, then they had to up it a little bit. So let's carry somebody over on my back, which you can see right here. And then another time, he walked out into the middle of the falls and fried an egg. I don't know how. It had some kind of heater or something to fry an egg over there. Another guy did it with a wheelbarrow.

But the pinnacle of the Niagara Falls showmanship was going over the falls in a barrel, right? We've all heard that story. 160 feet to the bottom. And nobody could get up the nerve to do it. And it went on for a long time. Until one day, there was this lady whose husband had died.

And she was having a hard time supplying money for herself. And she thought, "Well, if I become the first person in the world to go over this falls in a barrel, I will win fame and fortune for the rest of my life. And then I won't end up in the poorhouse. Seems like a good idea." So there's the barrel. There she is.

And let's go over this waterfalls. Now, I forgot to tell you something. She was 65 years old at the time. So a 65-year-old woman, not exactly who we would expect, 1901, climbs inside a wooden barrel, pressurized it, pumped it up with a bicycle pump to make sure she had air, and sealed it really good. And she goes over the waterfalls. She lands, and she is perfectly unharmed, walks away from it. But instead of winning fame and fortune like she anticipated, nobody really wanted to do much with the story because it's a 65-year-old woman. It's not really good. It's not really good business. They were thinking something a little more interesting, right? This is kind of your grandma that went over the falls.

And oh, what do we do with this situation? And it really surprised everybody. Wow, why did she go first? Well, nobody dared try it for another 10 years. So she held the title for 10 years until some young, strapping athletic fellow was like, "I'm not going to let a 65-year-old woman beat me." So he hops in a barrel, and he goes over the waterfalls in 1911.

But it made much better showmanship because here's this young, athletic, let's go tour the world, and here's somebody who went over the falls in a barrel. So that's what they did. He became famous. Went over the falls, hurt himself a little bit, but he was okay. He toured the world. So now you have two people that went over the waterfalls. A genuinely terrifying experience, right?

And lo and behold, this guy who went over the falls in a barrel is in New Zealand, touring the world, telling his amazing story of how he did something so daring. He's walking along, steps on an orange peel, slips, falls, busts his leg, gets infection, and dies from an orange peel.

Now, why do I tell you that story? Because the things we fear may not even be the things that kill us.

I have personally never been terrified of stepping on an orange peel. That has never crossed my mind. But I am genuinely scared of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. What is it about fear? It's so hard to nail down. Why do we fear the things we do? Why do we let it control us? And really, what feeds our fear? And this is actually really important to determine, okay, what is feeding my fears?

Right now, we're living in a, excuse me, in a bit of a unique time as a country, right? We just had a new president come in, and there's a lot of fear going around. And so today, I'm going to nail a lot more practical things, actually, as far as how we process information, how we let things affect our thought process, and what information are you feeding on? What is feeding your fears? So this gets a little practical, but here we go. This is what I call the two-edged sword, right? Social media. These things are wonderful. We all like to use WhatsApp to communicate with our friends. We have Facebook so we can keep up with family.

But there's this amazing thing about technology, and that is it's really good at spreading a lot of things that are simply not true. And this is really important for us to understand as believers. How does that affect how we think? What's our thought process? What attitudes is it feeding inside of us? Going back to that fear thing, a lot of this stuff comes back to fear mongering, getting you scared and like, "Oh my, what's going to happen?" The uncertainties of the future are feeding the chaos. And those are the kinds of things that these platforms can push because that's what gets the most attention. And there's something about us that we like getting consumed with this stuff.

But something that we really have to keep in mind here, God doesn't give us a spirit of fear, right? So that's where we have to start. "Don't fear, for I have overcome the world," says Jesus. So how are we opening ourselves up to fear? And why does it matter? There's a couple of reasons. Our spiritual mandate, discernment matters. Interpreting things, analyzing things, understanding what's true and what's not, not giving in to misinformation, which, by the way, misinformation is not a new problem. It's rather a human problem because there's something in us, again, that feeds on that, that feeds on that fear and uncertainty and chaos.

And so we find ourselves with Pilate asking, "What is truth anymore? There's so much confusion, so much fear, so much uncertainty right now." So this is a picture of the world, right? This is the world. You can see the different continents right here in the atmosphere.

Yeah.

No? Somebody's chuckling. Why is this not a picture of the world? It's not flat. The world's not flat. Who said that? Somebody did. Okay. Are we sure? How do you know the world is not flat? Foucault's pendulum. Okay.

You've been in an airplane. You've been in an airplane. All right. Now, here's the thing. Almost 2% of Americans believe that's an accurate picture of the world. 2%, which is actually a significant number of people when you figure the population of the United States, right?

Are we sure this isn't true? Yes. Like sure, sure? It was explored and proved wrong. Okay. See, here's the thing, though, right? When you go on the internet, you can find proof for any theory that you could ever possibly imagine. Any deep-set fear you have, you can find out that it's actually real. The Earth is flat. The whole world's been lying to you. Everything's a lie. You can't trust anybody. Fear, fear. Don't trust. Conspiracies or theories? Conspiracies would probably be a little better. But some people, "Oh, but are they conspiracies? Maybe they're just truth."

People start going down these roads. This all wraps into our mindsets of fear. What are we feeding? So the near infinity of information you can find on the internet, right? We were mentioning social media, messaging apps. You literally can find data for anything you want on the internet to "confirm" any random fear mongering, I call them fear mongering theories or conspiracy theories, that you could ever imagine. Now, here are just a few that I have personally encountered, which I find kind of fun. The government is going to shut off the internet on April 1st so that they can kidnap all the Christians in the world.

April 1st. I thought that date was quite intriguing that they thought it'd be that day. And that was in 2020. I don't know if any of y'all heard that, but I had some people in my network that were like, "Is this going to happen?" And it's like, "Well, didn't you notice the April 1st thing?" Anyway.

And then April 1st comes and goes. Nothing happens. We're still all here. How about that? This one, I love this one. Birds aren't real. Go check it out. Birdsaren'treal.com. There's a group out in Memphis, in my state, and their headquarters in Arkansas. I thought it was satire. Nope. They're 100% serious. Birds do not exist. They're not real. What happened is, in the 1960s, the government systematically massacred all the birds in the world and simultaneously replaced them with drones that are now spying on us. So newsflash.

Again, I thought this was not real, but it is. People actually believe it. So again, that fear, "Oh my goodness, we've been deceived this whole time." This one was really interesting around election season. They were like, "Oh, so-and-so candidate can't even do math because 2 plus this equals this, and he's saying in his thing that this equals that." And anyway, it was so simplified. It was like, "Okay, something's off here." Literally went on that person's website. They had completely made up the numbers. Totally, totally bogus. "Oh, but they can't do basic math." And you know how stuff spreads around on Facebook? And then, "Oh, we can't trust these people. Fear, fear, fear. Don't listen." And it turns out it was absolutely just made up.

Somebody just made something up, put it on Facebook, and then my friends start sharing it. It's like, "Wait a second. Why did you even share that? You were sharing that out of fear, out of a knee-jerk response to something."

My personal favorite. The Middle Ages actually never happened.

Newsflash. They never happened. There's about 500 years of world history that's completely made up, and the historians are lying to you. It's called the phantom time hypothesis, invented by some professor somewhere. I find that one very intriguing. Okay.

So where are we going with all of this? Building discernment. What is our responsibility in these things? It's so easy to give into the fear and to hear the things you want to hear. But we are above that. As the people of God, the church's responsibility is what it has always been called to be: trustworthy, responsible, and stable. Does not matter what's going on out there. God's people should always be this: pandemic, government upheaval, persecution.

This is our calling. Discernment is rooted in the reality of God. God doesn't author confusion or fear, but it's rooted in who God is. And just some practical things. Keep this in mind. What's the source of this? Who are you listening to? Who are you letting influence how you think? Are you letting them play on your fears? Again, fear is a very human, universal human thing. Are you letting the information you listen to play on those fears? And then confirmation bias. There's something in us that likes to feel like, "Oh, we're in the know." We know something that nobody else knows, and we figured it out. And fear, we know the real story, right? And we can try to put pieces to what we're feeling and think that we've actually figured something out.

And let's just look at confirmation bias for a second. Everybody has a bias. But we default to the data that "confirms what we already believe." And remember, all of us have this thing called fear inside. So when something comes along that plays to that, it's very easy to just say, "Oh, well, that already confirms what I feel. I already feel that way anyway. So it's probably true." And that's as far as we go. We don't actually research it any further. Human nature defaults to fantasizing about our worst fears. This is just what we do. I don't fantasize and stay up late at night, "Oh, no, what would happen if I stepped on an orange peel?"

Has that ever happened to anybody? No. But have you ever had where you can't sleep at night because you have these ideas of, "Well, ha, going skydiving," like Jason and I were talking about last night? That might keep you up. Now, that's a little different, right? But we fantasize about these things, and we default to our worst fears.

What does this look like, practically speaking?

It's called an echo chamber. It's where we hear what we want to hear. And the very architecture of the internet, particularly social media, is to show you what you want to see. That's how companies make money: Facebook, Google.

And it's called the echo chamber effect. If they can show things that already play on the fears you already have, you stay on their services longer, and they make money. So things like search engines will optimize to show you things that may play to your fears. Social media is really good at this. And I think we all kind of witnessed this in the pandemic, especially in about the middle of 2020. The amount of stuff flying around on Facebook was overwhelming. And most of it wasn't true, from what I was seeing in my feed, at least. But it was just playing to these fears, getting people all hyped up and scared about things that maybe weren't even true to begin with or were blown out of proportion.

But that's not really the point because Facebook doesn't care. They want you to stay on their service. And people fall into that trap, going down the spiral, like David and I were talking about last night, the slippery slope, going down that rabbit hole of fear.

Especially inflammatory content. The more divisive, the more likely you are to react to it, right? Because it plays towards your emotions and your feelings, and you'll react, and then they'll react. And then before we know it, we're all going down this big spiral that has no end down the rabbit hole.

So how are we supposed to think? What's our theological obligation when encountering things like this? What does this actually look like? Actually, I would like to hear some feedback on that. I think we're all aware of these things. But what do you do in a world that feeds on fear?

How do you respond to these things?

Unplug. Unplug. I like that. I heard of a political commentator. I didn't read the book, but he wrote a book. The title is Addicted to Outrage. And I realized that I was in that book. I didn't like it. It was a very negative thing.

I have no social media accounts. I spend more time praying and reading the Bible. It's like I realized I was feeding on that negative addiction, and it was. So it was like what you were feeding on had direct ramifications, and all you have to do is change the information input. Yeah.

That's fantastic. Yeah. What about the rest of you?

Philippians 4:16, is it? I think so, yeah. Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are just, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, and there's two or three others that I can't remember. Think on these things.

But why is it human nature defaults to negative? Have you all ever noticed that? If you doubt me, go check your Facebook feed. It's like people just default to negative. Not always, but it's so easy to do that, yeah?

Just recently bidding a thing where I was pointing out on Facebook trash. And all I said is, "We live here. Why don't we pick it up?" 146 responses. Most of them were, "I don't live there. They're pigs." There was two or three, "Why don't you start a parking house and throw the sexual predator attack?"

But there were three people out of 146 that said, "I want to help." That's why I don't unplug. I don't want to be involved. But I do pervase in the news once in a while.

It's very easy to point at things and say, "Oh my, that's so terrible," but not do anything about it. And then what do we do? End up feeding that fear cycle again. It's a cycle, these things. So here's one that I found particularly helpful for myself. Beware of statements that you cannot prove or disprove, statements that are forever shrouded in uncertainty.

Again, going back to humans are really creative when it comes to fear. Sometimes we're not even sure what to be afraid of, so we'll be just afraid of the unknown. If you run out of things to get afraid of, be afraid of the unknown because that will always be there. And we tend to do that as well. So afraid of the unknown, things shrouded in uncertainty. So I'm going to show you, here's a picture of my invisible pet elephant.

Don't you see it? It's right there.

You guys are laughing, and I'm getting offended because this is my pet elephant, and he's invisible.

Why are you laughing? Why does this not make sense?

It knocks you moral. Okay. But prove me wrong. Prove that that is not my invisible pet elephant. It's a picture of something invisible. Man, I don't know. He's right there. It's really annoying because you can't see him, and sometimes he just bumps around the house and why is that statement make no sense?

You can't disprove it, right? So we could sit here for the rest of the day going around and around in circles about why I have a pet elephant. And you guys would be like, "No, you don't," but you could never disprove me because you can't prove that it's you have no way of saying that it's not actually there.

You see how these things can spiral, spiral, spiral, spiral? Because it's impossible to actually definitively disprove. You can't point to it and say, "This is wrong," right? And these are the kinds of statements that's so easy to turn into going down that rabbit hole of, "I don't know if that's true or not," and then people will end up sharing it or it'll play to their fears, so they'll believe it. And then do you see where I'm going with this? This happens all the time, and it's so, so easy to get into this stuff. It's impossible to disprove. Avoid those things.

And here's the one that I found really helpful. If conspiracies, fear-mongering, take your pick, whatever you want to call it, are true, then so what? Realistically, what are we actually going to do about it? Historically, the church has been faced with worse times than what we're living in right now.

Much worse, actually. And we are positioned in the kingdom of heaven, and that's where it is. It's not in the fleeting empires of this world. And we can rest in that. So really, what does it matter? What difference will it make if we go down that rabbit hole? Kind of like what you were saying earlier, unplugging from that, what am I feeding? What am I allowing myself to think and meditate about?

I'm going to share a little of my story here just to tie it together a bit with that first story I told. So I went to a Bible school a number of different times, eventually graduated from there because I wasn't really sure what to do in life.

And I knew, okay, this is the right direction I should be going. It's a good thing to do, but I'm not really sure where I'm supposed to go. And I remember it got to a point where numerous times I would just say, "Okay, I'm here, God. What do you want me to do? I really want to live for something here, and I'm getting into my 20s, and I don't feel like I'm investing in something that I want to spend my life doing." And I remember one time I was like I was putting laundry away or something extremely mundane, but it's really seared in my mind where I finally was just like, "Look, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

Here I am. Whatever you feel like, God, come back to me when you know what you want me to do," I guess. I was kind of frustrated at that point. And then I went off to do another round at this Bible school. And in the middle of that term, somebody came and did a presentation.

And I almost didn't go, but one of my friends was like, "You really should show up. This is really interesting. It was an extra thing. It wasn't required that we come to it or anything." And here's a fella who is helping people in Iraq.

And I remember sitting there about halfway back and just being like, "Wow, that's really interesting. That's really neat that people are doing that. Man, I could never do that. I'll never go there. That's not going to happen." I remember that being so clear in my mind. I know I'm not called to that. Not going to happen.

Clear as a bell, right? So I go after the presentation was done. He was back there and thanks. And I said, "Well, hey, if there's some way I can help empower the vision stateside, I don't want to go stateside, help you with admin or something. That would be great. That would be I'd be willing to help out."

And he said, "Oh, that's wonderful. You know what we really need? What we really need right now is someone who has a good camera who can go over as soon as possible and get us lots of pictures and videos about what's happening."

And I was like, "Oh, no, that wasn't what you're supposed to say." Because that's kind of what I do, right? I do a lot of video work and YouTube and these different things for different nonprofits. And I actually wasn't going to respond to him. I was just going to be like, "Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, whatever." And that was going to be that. I was walking away. I'm out of here. I'm never going to that place. And you have to remember, this is 2015. This is when ISIS was unstoppable. We didn't know what was going to happen. The talk at the time was Baghdad was going to fall at any moment.

It was crazy. The airport kept getting shut down because ISIS kept getting so close. They were threatening us. They had to shut down planes and stuff. It was a very, very uncertain time. And one of my friends was staying at the table and heard this person say, "Hey, they need someone with video and photos." And he's like, "Oh my goodness, that's great." He put my arm around me. He's like, "This is your guy right here. He should go." I was like, "Oh, no, you shouldn't. Oh, I don't want to." And what do you do in that moment? So I filled out the little thing, "Okay, yeah, sure. I'm kind of quasi interested. I don't want to go."

I handed it to him. That was that. I'm out of there. See you. Never going, right? Well, God has this thing about the things we're afraid of. And sometimes he turns them on their heads. And a few months later, guess what?

I was on a plane to Iraq in May of 2015. So here we go. We get to Iraq. And you know what? There was no handwriting in the sky. There was no these amazing epiphanies of, "This is where you need to be." No, it was much more mundane than that. It was running through the streets with a camera, filming refugee children, having a blast, playing with these people who had lost everything, who had lost family members, who had just survived an actual genocide. The uncertainty of it. We'd go to the top of our rooftop in the evening, and we could look out and see the Tigris River in the distance and hear the machine gun fire on the other side of the river, 20 miles out or so.

Motor rounds coming in in the evenings. And it did something to me. It did something that I did not expect. And so I get home, and I said, "Okay, I'm in. I want to invest. I still don't feel like I need to live there. I'm okay going there now, but I want to empower this vision. I want to get behind this." And then guess what?

Crickets. Nothing happened for a year. For almost a full year, nothing happened. And that was a really hard time. I just had to face this fear I had. This is like, "I don't want to go." I almost felt like Jonah in some ways. I don't want to go. And then I ended up going. And then I'm like, "Okay, God, all right. You made your point. All right. I'm willing to get behind this." And then what does God do? "Okay, here you go. Sit down, wait for 10 months. Just wait and don't do anything. Go home, invest in your church, work a normal day job, and wait." And that was really, really hard. That was really good for me, but it was really hard.

There's this weird mindset when you go into the unknown because it's unknown. You don't know. It's kind of like an invisible elephant. You don't know. And it's so easy to go down that spiral of fear. What am I getting myself into?

And then the call came, "Would you like to get involved again?" There's a new organization starting up, and I got involved. And here we are today. I just got back from my eighth trip to Iraq. Absolutely love the place. Love what we're doing.

And seeing powerful things happening with people who that never would have happened otherwise if I had given in to the fear. And out of that has come a very interesting new thought process for me about dangerous places, following Jesus in challenging situations. And I want us to look at Mark chapter 1, just a short passage here. So Mark chapter 1, verses 19 and 20. So the setting here is Jesus calling his disciples.

And I'm going to read this in the ESV.

So Mark 1, verse 19. So Jesus is by the sea. He's been calling different disciples. And he comes up. And going a little farther, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets.

And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him. Now I've read that, and I always enjoyed that passage, giving up everything for Jesus, following him. But I never quite captured what that was for these people until after going to some of these hard places myself. Now, let's reshape this story into 21st century and think what this would actually look like. So you're going through life minding your own business, just like these people were, just like I was, trying to make every day count, living your life.

These aren't super saints. These are normal people that are willing to answer the call, just living your life, right? And Jesus comes along and says, "Here is an open door, and here is a burden. Will you come with me?" Let's, again, think of what this story would look like in the 21st century. So we can just imagine, and some of this material. So I highly recommend you read this book. This helped me out a lot, why God calls us into dangerous places. So I'm going to be stealing a little bit from this book of what this might have looked like. So let's imagine in the 21st century, Jesus offers an invitation to James and John, and they look up from their nets and say, "Sure, but what's your vision, Jesus?"

Jesus is offering them an amazing experience of miracles, bringing hope, sharing redemption, and making a lasting change in the world. But can you imagine Zebedee, their father? Can you imagine his questions? What's the catch? These are difficult times. Following a preacher has consequences. And Jesus's response may well have been, and again, we're totally speculating, but just think about this.

Jesus's response might have been, "I'm sorry, young men, but there are other things you will experience too besides just the miracles and the redemption. People will hate us. They'll curse us and try to kill us. For a while, they won't succeed, but eventually, they will kill me brutally, and one of you will watch." James and John freeze in their tracks.

Zebedee cries out, "No, my sons, I forbid it." And perhaps James and John hesitate. The brothers study each other's faces. No, the invitation doesn't sound at all appealing. And yet, we know that many times during their journey with Jesus, both James and John had the opportunity to walk away, but neither did. We know that John stood at the foot of the cross and watched his beloved companion die a hideous death. We know that James, his brother, was put to death. In the shadow of this trauma, John summed up his experience with Jesus. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Surely he hadn't forgotten the violence and humiliation of the cross, and yet he spoke of glory, grace, and truth.

And this is what I call the other side of fear. It's called walking with Jesus in dangerous places. James and John could never have known what they were getting themselves into. They didn't. I mean, they were human. They were young men just living their lives. And Jesus says, "Here's a burden. Here's a call. Will you follow me?" And they may not have understood everything, but we know one thing. Jesus called, and they ached to follow him.

And that's each of us. Jesus comes into our lives, and we don't know where all that's going to lead us. It may lead us to dangerous places. It may lead us to places where we will really have to battle fear and uncertainty and the unknown. But we ache to follow him nonetheless.

Our lives are like that. It's very much that way for me when it comes to Iraq. We don't know how it's all going to end, but we ache to follow Jesus there nonetheless. As we look back on everything, both the beauty and the brutality, we decide we don't want to trade that for anything in the world. Following Jesus is worth more.

We don't always know the potential uncertainty of situations, fear, physical danger, where they will lead or how they will change us. But we give that fear to God and allow him to lead and take one step at a time. We go to dangerous places because Jesus loves the people in dangerous places. That one's easy for me to understand. It's very easy for me to go to Iraq and say, "Yeah, I can see how Jesus loves these refugee children, these women who have lost their husbands and are now widows because of ISIS." It's very easy to understand. But what was much harder was meeting a calling Muhammad, who was an ISIS fighter and had just surrendered six days before.

He had been fighting for the Islamic State the week before. Comes back to our village. He wasn't put in prison. He's right down the street. And we meet this fellow, and we sit down with him, and we share tea together.

It was a very bizarre experience knowing what he stood for, what he fought for. And you could see it in his eyes. Jesus loves people like that too. That was much harder for me to understand, to wrap my mind around it. Jesus loves the people in dangerous places, whether they deserve it or not.

Even places like Iraq, even evil people, even those who could not possibly deserve him. But Jesus is waiting for his people, you and I, to go into those places and be the hands and feet of Jesus. Jesus doesn't call us to places that he hasn't walked first. Jesus walked in a dangerous place. He lived in a dangerous place. He experienced poverty, hunger, exhaustion, hatred, mobs, a tyrannical government. Ultimately, he was executed.

His disciples experienced the same thing. Jesus doesn't call you to walk somewhere that he hasn't walked first.

Learning to say yes to God is very hard. In fact, this is terrifying.

This is terrifying. Like that time in Sinjar. But this is fear that we must face, and we must get to the other side of fear and not let it feed and corrupt the inside of our souls. When you get to the other side of fear, a whole new world opens up. And this is the part that really stuck with me.

What did you need that fear for? When you hold on to the fear and let it eat you and consume you, and it's holding you back from what Jesus wants you to do, what did you need it for? Why?

And when you get to the other side, when you walk that path, and you go, what I say, beyond fear, to the other side, you don't go around it. You're not trying to get out of it. You walk through it with Jesus beside you. You walk through the fear, get beyond the fear.

What did you need the fear for? You don't need it.

If you answer God's call, your life will be changed. When we go, we're forever changed. The journey changes us. And I can really identify with that, the pain, the trauma, the difficulties. But in the end, Jesus shines through.

I view fear and fear-mongering and the things we see in our world today as a fundamental issue. And I have a friend who summed this up much, much better than I ever could. So I'm going to just read this excerpt from an email he sent me. This is from Gary Miller. I'm sure a number of you know him. And this is what he said. "I have wondered if one of the problems with most conspiracy theories or fear-mongering or take your pick, feeding on the fear, like we've been discussing, is that they attribute undue power to evil.

Years ago, my wife had some medical struggles, and we suddenly became the target of many cures. Very well-meaning people sent all manner of remedies, and I wasn't sure how to respond. So I contacted a friend who was a physician and asked for advice. I told him I wasn't going to live long enough to investigate all these lotions and potions and wondered what should I do. He was very kind but made this comment. Whenever you hear someone say that doctors know that a certain cure would heal people, but they aren't telling people so they can make more money, be very skeptical. We doctors rarely agree on anything, and we certainly couldn't unite and conspire to withhold information."

As I thought about, as I have thought about this over the years, it seems that one of the problems with conspiracy theories is that they are saying that evil is more powerful than good. Catch that. In other words, evil forces are capable of uniting humanity in a way the church has never been able. After all, being able to conspire and convince the entire world that the earth is flat instead of round is no small achievement, like we were discussing earlier.

It is a unifying feat that the church could only dream of. It would seem that believing that governments, corporations, and research organizations are capable of collaborating without anyone blowing the whistle is believing that evil's capability to unite is more powerful than God's ability to unite his own people.

You see what he's getting at here?

We feed that fear, and we end up almost sometimes believing evil is more capable than the church. And I refuse to believe that. Don't give in to the fear. Don't give in to the fear. That was an email he had sent last year, right in the middle of the pandemic when everybody was coming up with all kinds of ideas.

Really, this is about a proper paradigm. The world is watching, and our words matter. Don't waste the precious resources God has given, our time, energy, money, whatever it may be, on what we cannot change in the kingdoms of this world. The church is a beacon of light and truth, not a source of confusion, fear, and misinformation. We show the world who we are by how we love, not by our Facebook rants.

So, to bring it all together, move beyond fear and into hope. So, how do we do that? We're running a little low on time, so we're going to just plow through this real quick. Why we hope the resurrection.

This is why we hope. This is why we do not give in to fear. This is why we can have joy in uncertain times in the midst of chaos. I really recommend you go and read this chapter after you go from here. It's the story of how the disciples are behind locked doors and hiding after Jesus has been executed.

And he shows up in the midst of them through the locked doors and says, "Peace to you. Here I am." And this is where we had the famous example of Thomas saying, "Wow, I want to touch you. I want to experience you. I want to believe." Powerful story.

Easter is the beginning of God's new creation, and therefore, we have a job to do. The redemption has come. Christ's kingdom is here. It's time for the church to bring hope into the world. There's no locked doors in the kingdom of God. That's what we see in that story. No locked doors. Jesus comes right in anywhere that he's invited.

This is the message of hope we have for the world. Jesus has conquered. His kingdom is coming. And as Jesus prayed, "Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Your kingdom come." Fear is cancerous, right? The resurrection is the cure.

It's the cure for fear and so much more. It ushers in hope. It opens the door to redemption. Go and share the cure. We have a choice to be consumed by fear, to feed on it, to let that cycle of chaos and uncertainty and the unknown feed into our lives.

Or we can walk with Jesus to a place beyond fear, the place of hope in the redemption, and the choice is up to us. So, in the end, in uncertain times, ultimately, the church will do what it has always done, put our shoulder to the plow and show the world what true love, service, humility, and peacefulness looks like. In a world of chaos, God's people, the church, stands in serene contrast. That's who we're supposed to be.