so unlike Fear...

One of the conferences we do every year is called Big Break. For four weeks during Spring Break campuses from all over the eastern half of the US come to Panama City Beach to share their faith with other Spring Breakers. Today I had an interesting conversation with our tech director, Ben Warren.

He would say, of the act of sharing or proselytizing, that he (and virtually the collective student body amassed here as well) is "scared shitless" to go out on the beach. That term is far from inaccurate in my own experience as well.

What is it about evangelism (especially of the type we call 'approach evangelism') that generates so much fear in the heart of a man? Yet it is so unlike Fear, so much greater than Fear. Would I (or anyone else in my shoes) be so afraid of selling vacuum cleaners or even peddling something so practically useful as sunblock?

Is it Doubt at the heart of our timidity? Are we (and I switch between the first person singular and plural flippantly because i find that my experience is not isolated) so Insecure about our own Faith that we shrink back and hide from sharing it with others? What conflicing intention drives us away from the beach? We live and die on our hills of "green" and "social justice" and fear not rejection in these battles, perhaps from a sense of intellectual superiority over our antagonists, perhaps merely conviction over what we feel to be true or right. We can share our Politik or Policy sure enough, but Heaven forbid we offend someone (or ourselves) by speaking of Love Himself, of Redemption, of the Greatest Injustice.

Instead, we concoct the grandest of exceptions of why we shouldn't share the Faith, or why we don't need to, or simply for why we don't. What could possibly be at the root of such evasion? Where else in life does fear exist to this exent? Can it be overcome? Should it?

[Incidentally, I would love to write a tale someday that features a character who is so arrested by fear that he recognizes it not as fear but something larger. No good ideas about that yet.]