This Sunday we are officially starting our Lent sermon series, “Hopes and Fears”. Hope and fear have an interesting relationship with one another. Fear often drives us to hope. When we experience fear, we begin to hope for something that alleviates we we fear. For example, if we fear being late for school, we might begin to hope what it would look like for us to be someone who is always on time. Hope, if adequately felt, drives away fear.
There is actually some brain physiology behind this. Fear is something that is felt in the quick-reacting amygdala, the home of our fight-or-flight responses and other reactions. Hope, however, is one of those things that is housed in our complex thinking center, the prefrontal cortex (more specifically, the orbitofrontal cortex, a suburb of the prefrontal just behind your eyes). This means that hope is housed in our complex problem solving center. So when we move our thinking from our amygdala to our prefrontal cortex, we make wiser and more thoughtful decisions.
But the fear is necessary. It grabs our attention and tells us that something is of dire importance. So while fear is not fun to experience most of the time, it is useful in terms of driving us to hopes. When we feel fear, we can usually help ourselves by moving those fears into the prefrontal cortex, asking ourselves questions like “what am I fearing here really?” and “what might I hope for?” God literally designed us to be able to work on our fears with hope in order to come up with better solutions than just our normal reactions to things.
This Lent, we are going to be slowing down our amygdala around some common fears – things like separation and sacrifice and insignificance, and we’re going to be dealing with those things using our God-given hoping brains. God gave us those brains for a reason, after all, so that we could experience what it is to hope in Him, to hope in how He equips us with grace and mercy and peace to deal with the fears in our lives, and how He has given us a Savior who promises to bring hope from our fears. That Savior faces fear in the wilderness, in His enemies who seek to do Him harm, and finally even in His death on the cross – and what He brings from those things for us is hope wrought from fear.