Fear

There was a murder in our neighborhood last night.

My colleague JP had just taken his 6-year old son Isaac to the bathroom. I was left at the outdoor table with Lin, Isaac’s 10-year old Cambodian neighbor buddy. We are out on a lunch together while our wives are away in the villages doing ministry and Isaac’s big sisters are busy with teenager stuff. Lin doesn’t make eye contact with me. His statement is almost monotone as he concentrates on the small discs of the Connect 4 game.

My dad said the murderer got killed though. Otherwise he would have killed me too.

JP shared with some astonishment earlier that morning the news of the night before. There had indeed been a double murder and then a suicide in their normally quiet neighborhood. Clearly something internal. Perhaps an adulterous spouse confronted with their lover. Perhaps a drug deal gone wrong. I had little doubt it was a private matter, not the actions of a crazed mass-murderer. Most of our astonishment was at how the killer could have gotten a gun in the first place.

So it’s a good thing he’s dead. It saved my life. But now I’m afraid of the dark.

His small hands continue to fidget with the red and yellow discs as he focuses on them rather than me. I have to go down a dark hallway to get to my bedroom and there’s a door that’s open to a dark room and I always run past it as fast as I can. Then I’m safe. It seems clear his fear of the dark has preceded this recent deadly event.

I used to be afraid of the dark as well, I admit to him. And I can well remember the terror-filled nights waiting for sleep to come, eyes clamped shut against the monsters under my bed and behind the headboards, as well as less supernatural fears, like my obsession with the fear of the house catching fire because of some errant piece of paper left over one of the floor heating vents. News stories can be fertile grounds for terror with young minds.

He talks more about his fear, about his timing for starting his dash past the dark doorway, his various other ways of combating his fear, and the good fortune the murderer was killed before Lin and his own family were murdered. He is far more garrulous than interested in listening. I pray and struggle for what to say. How to speak of peace and hope and comfort to this small child from another country and culture and language and religion? How did I comfort my children – how could I without the hope of Christ?

I used to be afraid, but Jesus took away my fear, I finally state as the footsteps of JP and Isaac draw nearer. Lin doesn’t respond or acknowledge. I don’t know if he hears or not.

I *do* know that the Holy Spirit is in the business of seeds, and I have to trust that perhaps this statement will stick in Lin’s mind through the years ahead. That perhaps others will make similarly simple and apparently ineffective statements of faith, and that one day the tipping point will come when these collected seeds begin to sprout by the power of the Holy Spirit, leading Lin not just towards less fearfulness against whatever bogeys infect his life at that point, but towards life here and now and eternally because of Jesus the Christ whose death and resurrection destroyed the ultimate power of sin and death and Satan and fear.

Pray for Lin and his family and for the work of the Cimas as they continue to share the love and light of Jesus in this beautiful country.