There is a profound difference between danger and fear. Some of us, myself included, can be a bit recklessly bold when it comes to getting ourselves in some kinds of danger. One can know that there are risks in certain kinds of behavior and make the conscious decision (for whatever reasons) that one will not change one’s behavior even in light of those dangers, with an acceptance (however uneasy) of the circumstances. Danger is real; the risks are not imaginary, but a person with a sufficient amount of courage and bravery (or foolishness) can face those risks as manfully as possible. Fear is not real. It is a figment of our imagination, as our mind takes bits and pieces of reality and constructs a false narrative that makes us a prisoner of our insecurities. An awareness of danger leads us to a greater understanding of reality, even if it does not necessarily determine our behavior. Fear, on the other hand, is a perversion and a corruption of reality that leads us to act in ways that are immensely counterproductive and useless.

I have known fear often in my life. Over the course of my adulthood I have sought to recognize the source of the fear and to overcome it, so that I need not feel any insecurity about where I come from or where I am going to the greatest extent possible. After all, anything that we are afraid of us has power over us, and I’m not the sort of person that wants others to have power over me–I tend to be rather stubborn in that way. I also hate it when others are afraid of me, but even if their fear would give me power over them if I were the sort of person who wished to take advantage of it (I’m not), that fear is under their power. There is honestly little that one can do, if others are afraid, that will completely get rid of that fear, though there are plenty of actions one can do that would justify that fear in the eyes of those who are afraid and insecure. Fear cannot be eliminated until someone sees the truth and the lie and is able to distinguish between the two, and recognize that they are responsible for how they respond to life. Life is dangerous enough without our construction of false narratives about the world around us, and fear robs us of a great deal of joy and strength in the way it saps us and leads us to define ourselves as victims of the wickedness of others when in reality we are often only victims of our own insecurity.

It took me a long time to realize that other people could be afraid of me, and that the way I am as a person tended to provoke the sensitivities and insecurities of others. I should have come to the lesson a lot sooner, but for better or worse I was long so self-absorbed in my own fears and insecurities that I could not fathom how anyone could be afraid of me. But over the last few years I have understood that there are aspects of who I am that make certain people afraid and respond accordingly. And rather than being hurt by their lashing out in their weakness and fury, I feel a sense of sadness and even pity that others often cannot recognize my lack of interest in hurting others. I am aware that given my gifts and longings that I could be a threat to others if so chose to be. But I have consciously chosen to use my gifts to serve others to the best of my abilities rather than use them to exploit and manipulate and take advantage of others. I have chosen to defend the weak and the powerless from oppression rather than to oppress others myself. It was a conscious decision, though, and certainly it could easily have gone the other way.

And yet despite the fact that I have chosen not to take advantage of others, I am aware that what I consider moral courage in the face of this world’s evil can seem to others like needless risks and errant and reckless folly. Worse, my firm and fierce commitment to honesty and openness can be a direct threat to those who see secrecy as a defense from the scrutiny of the outside world, and my general desire to get to the bottom of a matter and understand it as fully and deeply as is humanly possible can be terrifying to those who are not willing to see their wicked deeds or gross incompetence widely known. We all desire to save our face, to have a sense of dignity, and when that is threatened people tend to react savagely. Often in my life I have not been sufficiently sensitive to recognize the threat I possessed to the well-being and dignity of other people, and that my ferocious case-making tendencies cut those who felt rather weak and insecure, and felt that I desired to take away from them their offices and power and legitimacy and everything that made life worthwhile for them, when all I sought to do was to speak the honest truth so that we could face reality and then make this world at least a little closer to the way it should be. It is no defense to say that I am at least as unsparing to myself as I am to others, because life is difficult and unpleasant enough that all of us benefit from kindness and consideration, and because the truth in the hands of those who are not loving can be immensely destructive and hurtful.

Those who are insecure often seek power, whether it is in families or institutions or nations, in order to bolster their own resources with the resources of others, and to clothe their own poor self-esteem with the honorable robes of honorable office, so that others may esteem and respect them and so that they may (through their power and titles) respect themselves. But such power is often a crutch, as the self-esteem and dignity of too many people depends on the offices they hold rather than their honor and character and decency as human beings. No one can take away our character–only we can give it away through our blunders and sins. But people can take away our power and our offices, and so those who depend on their offices for their legitimacy and sense of honor and respect are constantly insecure of anyone who might seek their power and offices for themselves, or whose heedless and open truthtelling threatens their legitimacy and lowers their respect in the light of others. Seen in that light, it is comprehensible how someone like myself can be seen as threatening, and how others would lash out rather fiercely, to the extent of libel and slander.

Worst of all, in seeing how others feel hurt and threatened by me, I recognize that my own insecurities about the abuse of power from those who are officeholders makes me exceptionally threatening to officeholders, as my own recognition of the dangers of the abuse of power and my fierce exposure of the abuses of authority makes me a very real threat to the legitimacy of those who abuse power not because they are strong, but because they are weak. And I have not loved these people or honored their offices enough, throughout the course of my life, to have eased their concerns, but rather I have inflamed them at every turn. I have not done this because I wish to hurt them, but we have both seen each other as threats, and so each of us engaged in behavior that simply fed into the fears of the other. They saw me as a threat to their own security, and saw my own actions and words (especially in writing) as insubordinate and disrespectful. I saw them as abusive power-hungry tyrants, and their wounded lashing out proved them as such in my own eyes (and in the eyes of those who were prone to be sympathetic to me).

This world is full of walking wounded. No one makes it through life without horrible injuries. If it is not the cutting and cruel remarks of others, the insults, the slights, the teasing, the humiliation and embarrassment, then it is the random and purposeful suffering we all endure from health problems, natural disasters, or acts of violence and abuse. Because we all live in a wicked and fallen world, we all suffer horribly as a result of the sins of others. Because we are often insecure and unobservant of the effect of our words and actions on others, we hurt others a lot too, whatever our intentions. We are all sinned against and sinners. We perpetuate the bad habits we learn from parents and family, classmates, and institutions (like churches and businesses) on others, even when we suffer deeply from the hurt we have suffered in those places ourselves. We want to be loved and respected even when we don’t know how to show love and respect for others. We want unity and peace even when we don’t know how to help build up our institutions or avoid provoking conflict in our own lives and situations. Our longings and our capacities are completely mismatched, and we give ourselves and others unnecessary pain and suffering, even if we all come from similar ground with similar longings. We are so consumed with our own hurts and suffering that we fail to recognize the hurt we cause to others, and even when we do see it, and are horrified by it, it is often a difficult task simply to behave differently. Head knowledge is simply not good enough in light of the lack of practice so many of us have in behaving in gentle and loving and peaceful and respectful ways that help to provide healing in a world that knows suffering and misery and pain all too well.

How do we become part of the solution instead of part of the problem? How do we keep our openness and love of the truth from crossing over the line into humiliating others and causing them to lose face and respect? How do we distinguish between those who are deeply evil and corrupt and those who are well-meaning but incompetent and insecure, and who are afraid that an honest admission of their flaws and weaknesses would prevent others from respecting them? How do we provide the space and prepare the ground so that the truth is no longer seen as threatening and so everyone can be honest and candid about where they stand with a shared resolution to get better? How do we make so that we can help build up others and build up the broken institutions of our world, filled with broken and wounded people who feel overwhelmed and attached and harassed at every turn, rather than use the truth as a sword to cut open those whose wounds have never healed, or to tear down their security and their sense of honor and dignity and then act surprised that they turn on us in their hurt and in their shame? For we are all in the same boat. We all blunder, we all have deep longings and deep wounds, and we all long for love and respect. Why is it so hard to give others what we so deeply desire for ourselves? If we were wise, we would see that love and respect do not diminish when they are given, but rather they grow as we give, as those who feel loved and respected have more love and respect to give others themselves. But sadly, the insecure are not often wise–for knowing what to do is not very helpful when one simply does not know how to do it in a way that others would know and recognize. The knowledge only brings with it sorrow and frustration at the space between how we are and how it is and how we and it should be.