In George Orwell’s novel 1984, there’s a room which terrified residents of the totalitarian state known as Oceania.  The room is called simply, Room 101 and people feared it for good reason.  In room 101, the state exposed you to something terrible, your greatest fear.  In the course of the novel, the lead character is subjected to Room 101.  His encounters his greatest fear in life.

            The man breaks under the torture.  In so doing, he ends up betraying the love of his life.  The government agents come and get her thanks to the man’s confession and then she’s given the same treatment.  Room 101.  Where your fears destroy you. 

            And although it’s a fictional book, Orwell was right on the money about one thing.  Our fears can undo us. 

            Our fears can betray us.  Unhealthy fears can ultimately break us in two like desiccated twigs. 

            We all have fears.  The sad fact of the matter is that most of our fears are unwarranted.  The Bible tells us that the only thing we need fear is God himself, that, as Proverbs will tell us, is the beginning of wisdom.  Thus most, if not all, of our other fears are baseless.  Unwarranted.   Unhealthy. 

            Worst of all, our fears keep us from living the life God intends for us.  Think about it like this.  If we spend more of our time worrying about things than we do actually enjoying the life God shares with us, then we’re really missing out.  Christian author Max Lucado puts it this way – “Fear doesn’t want you to journey to the mountain.  If fear can rattle you enough, it will persuade you to take your eyes off the peaks and settle for a dull, lifeless existence in the flatlands.”

            Making matters worse, many outsides companies and institutions these days prey on our fears.  Take for example the news media.  They manufacture and stoke up fears in us.  Just watch an hour worth of news coverage and if you don’t come away with 10 new things to worry about, then I’d be surprised. 

            They do so, of course, for a reason.  Networks and papers and websites all employ what scares us as the means to insure ongoing viewership and readership.  My father kept an old political cartoon from the Charlotte Observer on his desk.  On it is the caricatured face of ta long time local TV news anchor saying the following words “Iraqi SCUD missiles screaming towards a North Carolina city…  Tune in for the 11pm news to find out which one” he says. 

            It was a funny cartoon because it captured the clear goal many news agencies exploit – people that are afraid will do just about anything you tell them to do. 

            Just think of all the time you’ve spent worrying about things that never came to pass.  For those of you who’re old enough, I’ll bet you remember the fears surrounding the year 2000.  The Millennium bug was going to shut down the banking system, the power grid and all forms of communication.  Within hours of the new millennium, chaos would reign and it would be every man (and woman) for themselves.  They made such a big deal about this, that some people cashed in their savings and bought generators, water, guns and other supplies to survive the impending disintegration of Law and Order.  Of course, those fears were exposed as completely bogus. 

            Most of our fears are just like that.  We needlessly worry about things that simply will not come to pass. 

            Fear can contort our wills into doing some inane things.  You see, when we’re scared, we go into fight-or-flight mode in which we artificially limit our options.  That is to say that when we’re frightened, we may not be as capable of thinking our way through something.