Chicken Little and Me

Chicken Little is afraid.  The sky is falling and she needs to tell the king.  She dashes off as fast as she can, running into friends along the way with whom she shares her fear.  “The sky is falling!” she yells, and her worried friends join the race to find the king.

My take on the well-known misadventures of Chicken Little and her friends tells a tale of fear and its infectious grasp.  Chicken Little had been minding her own business when out of nowhere an acorn fell on her head.  Her assumption and subsequent proclamation of the absolute worst case scenario caused hysteria wherever she went.  The moral of the story has always been, for me, something about the dangers of jumping to conclusions or believing everything I hear.  But the message I seem most to have identified with is one pertaining to fear.  Chicken Little’s mantra, “The sky is falling,” has become a phrase used to indicate the belief that disaster is imminent, however reasonably or unreasonably surmised.

From reports of wide-reaching economic devastation, unanswered corruption in America at large, the dangers of tainted drinking-water, or even the black tornados looming over the bread basket of this country, the sound of alarm is uninterrupted.  The current worldwide tenor is one of fear and uncertainty.  The sky indeed seems to be falling, and depending on the knock these stories make on mine and my friend’s heads I may even join in the commotion.  Broader cultural anxieties add to this sense of fearful doom.  If I am not consumed by soaring costs of living, increasing cancer rates, and declining job oportunities, I am fearful of the multiple ways in which my daughter, their husbands, and my four grandchildren face dangers that I have not, within a world where uncertainty now seems the only certainty. 

Playing on these anxieties, politicians, marketers, and media producers know well that fear is a compelling motivator, and a profitable one at that.  Like the music man in the Broadway musical, if they can convince me that “There’s trouble right here in River City,” I will hear what they have to say and open my mind (or wallet) to do something about it.  Just this week a news blurb about “the dangers of information gathering when joining a key chain discount club ” commanded my fearful attention and convinced me to stay tuned.

While the worry and unrest that is ever being stirred into the worldwide caldron may indeed be based on real concerns, the combined ingredients in this pressure-cooker are at best a recipe for misperception.  Focusing on my fears, ever-reacting to my worries, and accepting this culture of fear as a given, me.  I’m becoming more keenly aware, my fears tell me how to spend my money, react with my grandchildren, vote in an election, and participate in (or isolate myself from) society.  I become no different than Chicken Little or the slave in Jesus’s parable who withdrew in fear of his master and buried his talent in the sand. 

Yet the harsh rebuke of this slave in the parable of the talents makes it clear that safe-living is not an option, nor an ultimate value, in the kingdom of God.  Is there perhaps a distinctively Christian alternative to the atmosphere of fear that is so pervasive and contagious?  The parable of the talent asks me to see the power and control I allow to masquerade as security and so convince myself that I am living wisely, even morally upright, when I am really living in fear.  These fears move me to withdraw from the very kingdom Jesus calls me to join with him in announcing.  Instead of moving further up and farther into the kingdom he proclaimed, I dig for my soul a place in the outer darkness.

There is indeed an alternative, but I am finding it neither safe nor easy.  It involves laying down my fears to follow Christ with faith’s daring; it involves opening my life to a world that scares me, and rejecting the anxiety of a world convinced the sky is falling.  The Christian alternative to a culture of fear, which I desire to live more fully, is a kingdom of hospitality and abundance, vulnerability and generosity, love and self-sacrifice—the very kingdom Christ shaped with his living and dying, and invites me to do the same.

“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”