I’m sure you’ve heard someone say it, or perhaps that someone has been you, “I’m so afraid of the unknown.”
If you take a step back and consider that statement, it sounds pretty silly. How is it that you can be afraid of something you have yet to know? The answer: You can’t.
“I’m afraid of the unknown” is almost always a statement about fearing the known. Remember in Jurassic Park how the scientists filled in the Dino’s DNA gaps with frog DNA? It’s the same idea here. We have gaps in what we can know about the future, so we fill in those gaps with what we already know. You can’t be afraid of what you don’t know, so you fill the unknown with what you know.
Existentially, we humans are afraid of being out of control and not being a god. Practically, we’re afraid of being left behind, alone, betrayed, forgotten, and/or insignificant.
There’s no better place than the unknown to illuminate the fact that we humans are just humans. Fill it up with all your known fears, and you’ll never have to face what you don’t know. We’re not omnipotent. We don’t know everything. We’re limited. Fragile. Insecure. Capable of dying. And the unknown has all kinds of things that will hurt us.
And the unknown has all kinds of things that can help us find healing: New relationships. Different experiences. Finding God in new ways.
You should visit it sometime, the unknown is a pretty great place.
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