Reimagining the Good Life with Amy Julia Becker

S02 Ep. 101: A Global Pandemic, a Market Meltdown, No School, and the Bible

March 17, 2020 Amy Julia Becker Season 2 Episode 101
Reimagining the Good Life with Amy Julia Becker
S02 Ep. 101: A Global Pandemic, a Market Meltdown, No School, and the Bible
Show Notes Transcript

It was after the election of President Trump in 2016 that I first wrote the words, “Love is stronger than fear.” Fears haven’t abated in the past few years, and they only increased in the past few weeks as we face an unprecedented medical and economic crisis across the globe.

SHOW NOTES:
Book of Philippians

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0 (0s):
Hello friends. This is Amy Julia Becker, and I am starting season two of the love is stronger than fear podcast. If you've listened before this season is going to be different because I'm going to be recording in real time. As we, as a nation, walk through an unprecedented situation with this novel coronavirus that is truly sweeping across the globe and throughout our land, I found it so interesting.

0 (31s):
Ironic, good, bad. I'm not sure that this podcast was named. The love is stronger than fear podcast, because those are the words that have come through my head and my heart over and over and over again in this past couple of weeks, as we've started to see that this virus that began on one side of the world and has quickly begun to travel throughout the world and has caused suffering and chaos already, and may continue to do that. Um, and so many communities including our own, as I've seen that all happen again.

0 (1m 4s):
And again, the words that have come to me, our love is stronger than fear. And so I want to take this opportunity and I'm planning to do this over the course of the next 12 weeks might be a little shorter. It might be a little longer, we're going to find out, but hopefully over the course of these next couple of months together, to look at the book of Philippians, and I'll tell you why later and talk about Philippians in an age of coronavirus and in an age of fear.

0 (1m 35s):
But before I get to that, I want to talk a little bit more about where we are as a nation, where we are as people of faith, or maybe you're someone who doesn't really know what you believe, but you think maybe right now is a good time to be asking those questions. So for everyone out there, I want to talk a little bit about where we are and put that in some context and then talk about where we are going in this podcast, at least, and why I believe that the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the Bible, the old and new Testament can speak in a powerful, compelling, and really helpful way when it comes to fear and anxiety.

0 (2m 18s):
And specifically to our moment. So I am speaking right now, it's March 15th, Sunday, March 15th. And I just got word that the New York city public schools have closed down until April 20th. I'm aware of this because of people I know who have second homes, which is to say, who are able to leave New York city and go with their children to second homes. But I know that there also are tens of thousands of people who are just learning that they don't know what they're going to do when they go to work tomorrow.

0 (2m 52s):
They don't know if their kids are going to get lunch tomorrow that they don't know if they're going to get sick or not. Or if this disease going to continue to spread and proliferate in the scary spikes that we're seeing as possibilities. So many of us don't know if our healthcare system is going to be able to maintain and manage the numbers of people who are going to get sick. And we don't know how we will respond as a community when, and if those people do get sick, who are we going to be?

0 (3m 24s):
How is this going to work? Not only that we're finding this is unprecedented. I'm really convinced that in my lifetime, and even in my parents' lifetime, I had a conversation with my dad about this, that no crisis has been of this magnitude in this short, a period of time, because what we've seen in the past couple of weeks is an economic and a medical crisis happened simultaneously. And of course they're related to each other.

0 (3m 54s):
That's why they're happening at the same time. But we have a medical crisis that is going across the globe. We also have an economic crisis, both on wall street and on main street. So we have a medical and an economic crisis simultaneously. And so of course that gives rise to so much fear. And what happens when you're afraid? I mean, think about yourself just as a little kid, what happens when you're afraid you hide, maybe you cry and you protect yourself, you curl up in a ball and you worry about what's going to happen next.

0 (4m 32s):
And I am the same way. That's what I do when I'm afraid, but I want to try to speak into that fear. And I want to speak into that fear with the only thing that I believe can equip us and energize us and empower us to experience peace and freedom, and even a desire to serve other people. And that thing, that entity, that virtue that can combat fear is love.

0 (5m 2s):
So on the one hand, we're in this unprecedented moment, there has never been a virus like this before. It has been over a hundred years since we've seen a pandemic like this, we've never seen it correlate with an economic crisis at the same time. So this is new and it is scary, but the fear isn't new, the fear is incredibly human. And it's been with us for so long. I can look back. Actually I wrote a post right after the election in 2016, because so many people, whether they were Clinton supporters or Trump supporters were fearful fearful of what was going to happen to our nation, fearful of the divisions that we were experiencing in every different sector of our society, fearful of how people would treat each other fearful of the words we would use and the things we would do and what would happen to our nation.

0 (5m 57s):
And I'm in the midst of that fear. I wrote a blog post about what it means to trust in love instead of in fear. And at the end of this episode, I'm actually going to read that blog post out loud. So stay tuned if you'd like to hear that. But I also looked so much farther back than the 2016 election to say that fear is not new. And in fact, when I think about the situation that the new Testament Christians found themselves in the situation that the Jewish people to whom Jesus was speaking the situation, they found themselves in.

0 (6m 33s):
Well, guess what? It was a situation of constant medical and economic crisis. People were dying all the time. They didn't have antibiotics, they didn't have sanitation. They didn't have the security or the health that we have. So their lives medically were on edge all the time. And economically give us this day. Our daily bread is what Jesus taught his disciples to pray because they didn't know if they would have bread today, much less tomorrow.

0 (7m 8s):
And Jesus talks all the time about what it means to not worry and why we don't need to do that. And it's not because there's nothing to fear and it's not because there's nothing to worry about. It's because he says, God cares for you. Similarly, the apostle Paul who wrote most of the new Testament, he was a devoted follower of Jesus who wrote everything, um, and kind of the middle part of the new Testament, all these different letters to different churches that he founded. And he was writing over and over and over again about not being afraid.

0 (7m 42s):
And why, because love is stronger than fear. So Paul writes this famous passage in Romans chapter eight, in which he talks about nothing. Being able to separate us from the love of God. He says, death cannot separate us from the love of God. The thing you fear the very most it can't separate you from the love of God because of Jesus Christ. It's not just Paul. Then we get to these other new Testament letters written by. We call it a community that came out of John's community, the epistles of John first, John second, John and third, John.

0 (8m 19s):
And in first John chapter four, if you want to talk about love and fear, read that because it says perfect love, casts out. Fear. Fear keeps us from love, but love can take us out of fear. I really believe all of this. And again, I'm going to read at the end, some of the reasons and that I've come to this position of believing so deeply and firmly in the power of love, even in the face of fear.

0 (8m 51s):
But I want to point out right now that we are living in an emotional and spiritual context, that actually is in keeping with much of the globe right now, and certainly much of the globe when we think back through the ages, and that goes all the way back to the Jews and the Christians, and we have their words, we have their emotional and spiritual context. And so if you are looking for a source outside of yourself to contend with the fear that's going on right now, with the sense of panic, with the sense of even if you're not panicked, and you're just feeling like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to be home with my children for the next month.

0 (9m 31s):
And you've got to be kidding me. Any of those things, if that's where you are, guess what the scriptures of the Jewish and Christian Bible have a lot to offer. If you're interested, I would suggest going to the Psalms, the Psalms are kind of in the middle of the Bible. If you just kind of prop it open, there are a lot of them over a hundred. And as my husband has said before, the Psalms give you permission to have any emotion and express it to God, because you will find grief and fear and joy and hope, and you will find cursing and anger and you will find hatred and love, and you will find celebration and you'll find a lament, but often you will find people who are in a desperate situation, crying out for help.

0 (10m 18s):
So the Psalms are one place to go. The second place I would go, if you're looking for some scriptural guidance, some ancient wisdom about what to do when you're facing fear, I would go to the words of Jesus. The words of Jesus are most recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the first four books of what we call the new Testament. If you have a Bible and you haven't ever read it before, you can look it up and find Matthew Mark, Luke, or John Luke is my favorite, but not everyone feels that way. Um, and if you don't have a Bible, but you are interested in this, you can go to a site called Bible gateway.com and you can type in anything you want to find in the Bible and read it.

0 (11m 0s):
And I would look for the words of Jesus, especially when it comes to worry and fear, which again, he talks about a lot and we'll talk about here more in the weeks to come. But the final place I would go is to one of Paul's letters. And it's Paul's letter to the Philippians. We don't know very much about the Philippians anymore, but Philippa was a city in Greece. Um, and Philip high was a place where Paul had gone and helped to plant a church. And he writes the Philippians a letter. It's a pretty short letter, as far as Paul is concerned, only four chapters.

0 (11m 34s):
And it's known as a letter of joy. It's one of Paul's earliest letters. And he is writing to this group of people who he just adores. He just loves them. And he just wants to encourage them. And guess what his context is, he's writing from prison. So again, for those of you who are moms and dads who know that your children are going to be in your house in an unprecedented way for the next two, three, four, maybe more weeks, and you're not even supposed to go out and see other people. It is not the same as being in prison in around the year 40, um, CE, but, but, but it might feel that way to you as it might to me.

0 (12m 16s):
Um, when we get farther along in this journey right now, Paul is writing from prison and you know what he's saying? He's saying here's how to live without fear. Here's how to live with contentment. Here's how to live without worry. Here's how to live with love and joy and a sense of purpose. Here's how to follow in the way of Jesus. And so I'm going to take the next again, 12 episodes, which may be over the course of 12 weeks, or maybe I'll get that done more quickly to walk through Philippians with you and to relate it to where we are as a country to talk about what's going on with coronavirus and with the economy and with families and with our own family.

0 (12m 59s):
I hope this will be both practical and personal, but again, the intention is to equip you and to remind myself and equip myself with the love that is stronger than fear. So yes, we live in a time of fear and there's a lot to be afraid of right now, but we have resources and it's not just the ancient literature that I believe can teach us a lot about how to dig deep and find love.

0 (13m 29s):
Instead of fear, we don't just have the literature. We also have access through the spirit of God to love itself. In first, John four, John also writes that God is love that the most true thing about this universe, about creation, about who we are as human beings and about who he is. He, she is who made us the most true thing is love.

0 (14m 1s):
We are invited to trust in love instead of in fear to know that love to be filled up with that love in such a way that it overflows out of us. And we're able to give that to others and not just receive it for ourselves. We are invited to participate in love. And so over the course of these weeks together, that's what I want to do is talk and honest terms about how we can participate in love. If you have thoughts, questions, comments, criticisms, I'd love to hear them from you.

0 (14m 34s):
So please go to my website, my Facebook page, Instagram, uh, we'll post these episodes there. You also can subscribe at the love is stronger than fear podcast. I'd love for you to review that podcast. Let other people know about, I'd love to build a community of people who are thinking and talking honestly, and earnestly about these things. And just a second. What I'm going to do is read two old blog posts.

0 (15m 5s):
The one that I wrote, uh, right after the 2016 election and another, that is more of a recent follow up about why I believe that love is stronger than fear, but before I do that, I just want to sign off, um, to this part of the podcast. Thank you for listening. Please share with other people, please review. Please let me know what you're thinking. Um, and let's journey together this spring towards love and away from fear.

0 (15m 35s):
All right, here is the first blog post, which again was originally published. Um, in November of 2016, I rewrote it a little bit in 2018. Um, and I'm going to read that version right now. Trust your love instead of your fear. I first said those words in a conversation with a woman who had received a prenatal diagnosis of down syndrome, but they have returned to my mind again and again, I've held onto hope and love for my own child with down syndrome.

0 (16m 9s):
When she's diagnosed with scoliosis, trust your love instead of your fear, when she's not invited to a party, trust your love instead of your fear. When she comes home and tells me she's dating a boy in her class, trust your love instead of your fear. I've also taken those words as an invitation to look for love all around us. The love exhibited by friends and family members, teachers, and doctors by penny, herself by the consequential strangers in our life.

0 (16m 41s):
The crossing guard, the man who works at the post office, the cashier at the grocery store, who knows her by name. What if we, as individuals, as communities, as a nation trusted our love instead of our fear, what if we articulated the things about this nation that are worth loving the ideals of justice and freedom and the pursuit of happiness? What if we believed that love could bridge the gaps between ethnic and racial and religious groups?

0 (17m 13s):
What if we chose to love one person who represents the other two, us walked in his or her shoes listened to his fears, received her anger and hurt. There are many good reasons to be afraid, many good reasons to shut our doors and our hearts. And to only talk to people who read the same books and listened to the same news and work in the same places as we do. But what if instead, we decided to trust our capacity to love.

0 (17m 45s):
What of everyone who voted for Clinton decided to love a Trump supporter and versa. What if love triumphed? Instead of fear, I can only speak to my own little life with a baby girl who was diagnosed at birth with a genetic condition, destined to bring challenges. People told me to fear the doctors and the school system and the caregivers and the Sunday school teachers and the culture that would mock her and dismiss her and treat her as an outcast. But when she was five months old and needed ear tubes, the doctor gently took my baby girl in the crook of her arm and carried her back to the operating room.

0 (18m 23s):
So I wouldn't need to watch her be rolled away on a stretcher when she was two and having unexplained fevers, the church prayed for her and for us with gentle persistence until she was well, when she was five, she found her first best friend and they walked to school hand in hand when she was six, her school changed their structure and added a special education teacher so that she could fully belong in the classroom with her typical peers at each step.

0 (18m 55s):
Along the way, I have been called to trust my love for her to trust the love of our community. Instead of my fear, as I began to consider these thoughts, I wondered if they came only out of a place of power and privilege and protection out of the luxury of a white over-educated economically secure woman. But then I thought about the people who have modeled love instead of fear, Jesus Martin Luther King, president Obama, the men and women in Charleston who offered words of forgiveness to Dylan roof.

0 (19m 28s):
My friend, Patricia Ray Bon, who dared to hope even after her candidate lost the 2016 election, the Orthodox Jewish man in Florida who befriended a white nationalist, the heroes like Malala Yousafzai, who refuse to live in fear of the Taliban. It is not only my daughter who has taught me to trust in love, but these men and women throughout history and across the globe who have modeled a different way than the way of fear and hatred who have modeled a way of forgiveness and hope and healing fear causes us to duck our heads and hide to set our boundaries, to categorize human beings by their race, class, ethnicity, religion, or interest group, but love grows us up and it binds us together.

0 (20m 16s):
Love costs us. We make ourselves vulnerable to hurt when we love. We give time and money and resources. We risk broken hearts, but love also grows us up. It cannot be contained. It cannot be defeated. Even when the people embodying love are killed. Their love spurs others on love is the power that fuels the universe. And we are invited to participate in that power to be animated and anchored and transformed by that power.

0 (20m 48s):
I am grieved by the divisions within our nation, but I'm hopeful for our future. And I am choosing to trust my love instead of my fear. One more post I'd like to read to you in closing that I wrote in October of 2019, again, focusing on this theme that love is stronger than fear. When our daughter, penny was born and diagnosed with down syndrome, fear felt incredibly powerful.

0 (21m 20s):
The questions, the doubts, the potential medical complications, the prejudice against people with intellectual disabilities. I didn't even know I had carried in my heart for decades. It all welled up in a mountain of fear. I feared that I would fail completely as a mother and as a human being with a child with special needs. I fear that other people would reject our child and our family. I fear that she would suffer, but right there alongside the fear was love.

0 (21m 50s):
Love was quieter for sure. Gentler. If fear was a rock threatening to shatter me, then love was water offering to carry me along. What surprised me then? And in many ways, surprises me still is that over time, fear, retreated, or maybe it didn't retreat. Maybe it stayed in one spot and movable and as stone and love propelled us away from that mountain, There was the fear of medical complications softened by the doctors who reassured us of their care for penny and later by the recognition that she was healthy and growing and happy.

0 (22m 33s):
The fear that she would never have friends softened when she was invited to a birthday party in preschool. And again, when I saw her holding hands on the playground with their new best friend in kindergarten, and again, when she sat on the porch, outside my office with a new friend from middle school and they chatted and painted each other's nails, the fear that she wouldn't learn softened by her insatiable, if slowly progressing determination, to learn how to read, how to do the monkey bars, how to put on makeup, how to talk at the appropriate time at the lunch table.

0 (23m 8s):
Statistics show the discrimination and harm people with intellectual disabilities still face in social situations at school and in the workplace. My fears weren't unfounded. I just didn't know that love could carry us through those fears. That fear did not need to be the end of the story. Penny is almost 14 years old now, and whenever I find myself afraid, afraid that she isn't learning enough in school afraid that her friendships won't last afraid for that. Her scoliosis will progress.

0 (23m 40s):
I returned to the refrain to the truth that we have lived love is stronger than fear. What's more when I read about immigrants being denied access to the United States or about another innocent victim of police violence, or about antisemitic or racist symbols, scrawled in public in the midst of the fearful social realities of our modern world. I've returned to this refrain as well. Love is stronger than fear, but to get past that mountain of fear, we would need to collectively lament the ways we have allowed fear to divide us the ways we have held tight to our fear instead of surrendering to love the ways we have participated in harm and the ways we have failed to love out of our common broken and beloved humanity, we must allow love to carry us together away from fear and towards collective possibilities for healing.

0 (24m 42s):
I've caught a glimpse of this powerful, eternal, infinite force of love and the way it can heal families, heal friendships and heal communities. I trust that this love could even heal. A nation. Love is stronger than fear, but fear will win out unless we allow love to empower sacrificial action in the world. Love is stronger than fear, but only if we participate in love only as we entrust ourselves to love.

0 (25m 14s):
Only as we allow love to nourish us only as we allow love to connect us to one another and only as we become willing to give whatever it takes in order for love to abound.

2 (25m 29s):
Wow.

0 (25m 30s):
So again, if you've stuck with me this long, thank you for listening. I'm really looking forward to doing this together, and I'd love to hear from you I'm. You can find me@amyjuliabecker.com or on Instagram at Amy, Julia, Becker, Twitter, Facebook. Um, I would love to connect with you to hear what you're thinking, where your fears are, where your hopes for love are, what your questions are. Um, and please do tune in hopefully next week when we start reading Philippians together, thanks so much.

0 (26m 4s):
And until then, remember that love is stronger than fear.