Bishop Hughes speaks candidly about a challenge many of us face but rarely name: fear. Whether it’s fear of speaking up, taking action, or even praying, she reminds us that fear doesn’t disqualify us from God’s call – it’s often part of the journey – and she encourages us to “do it anyway… and do it afraid.” (Time: 5:49.)
Video Transcript
This is Bishop Hughes in the Diocese of Newark, and I want to talk with you about fear, which is something I’ve been hearing quite a lot about from people around the diocese and around the community. I’ve been hearing it in general for a while these days, and it’s the fear that keeps people from doing the thing that they feel that God is calling them to do. Most often, where I hear it is people say, “I’m afraid to say anything, because if I say something, it’s going to upset the situation I’m in. It’s going to upset the relationships that I’m in. I’m afraid to do anything. I don’t want to do anything that causes some kind of harm or that makes it worse. I’m afraid to be in a situation where I might get into trouble myself.”
“I’m afraid” – someone has said to me, more than one person has said to me – “I’m afraid to even pray at this point, because I don’t know that I am a very good prayer. I don’t know that I have the right words to say. Maybe other people who are stronger at praying should be the ones doing the praying at this point.”
Every time someone has talked to me about their fear, what they have really been saying to me is, “I feel called by God to do something, but I’m so nervous that I’ve talked myself out of doing it.”
I was thinking about this, and this weekend, it suddenly came to me. I remembered a sermon that I heard at my own first ordination, when I was ordained to the transitional diaconate before becoming a priest. It was the Reverend Teddy Brooks who preached, she is a priest in the Diocese of New York. She was a priest there then, and she still is today. And she preached about fear, and she was specifically talking to us as newly ordained people and saying, “It is going to be normal that you will be afraid. You’re going to be afraid you’re making a mistake, you’re going to be afraid of taking a risk, you’re going to be afraid of your own shadow half the time because you’re afraid you’re going to do it wrong. It’s normal to be afraid when you’re doing something new. It’s normal to be afraid when you’re taking a risk. And the way God is able to do something is you go with your fear and with God, and you do it anyway. You do it afraid.”
I remember those words, and from time to time, they come back to me. “You do it anyway, and you do it afraid.” They’ve stayed with me. And I was thinking this weekend when I remembered that you can go all through scripture and see these stories. I’ll just share two with you, Moses and Mary. Moses, face to face with God, and God says directly to Moses, “Go back to Egypt and save my people.” And Moses is afraid, and he doesn’t want to go, but he goes anyway. He does it afraid. He does it anyway, and God is able to do this wonderful work of freeing people who had been held captive. I think about Mary, the mother of Jesus, being told by the angel that she is going to bring the Savior of the world into being, and she sits there, not understanding, wondering, afraid, how can this be happening to me? And she does it anyway. She does it afraid.
In my own life, I’m so grateful to the Sisters of Saint Mary of Namur, who moved to Texas when I was a little girl, specifically to start an integrated school. Not a school for black children or Mexican children or white children, but a school for all children. It was the first. Schools were not integrated, they were segregated in Fort Worth at that time. And that is where I learned how to read and where I learned how to study. And I think about those sisters being the first to do something like that. I imagine that they were afraid, and they did it anyway. They did it afraid.
Dear ones, you have got to know that this is our time. This is our time where God is calling us into things that are going to feel really bold and are going to require courage and going to require bravery. But you have got to know that if God is calling you to speak up for someone else’s justice and for their right care in the world, if you do it anyway, and do it afraid even, God will do something with it. When you stand with someone as their friend, protecting them and making sure that they have their rights observed and that they have adequate legal representation, you may be afraid, but when you do it anyway, and when you do it afraid, God will be in it with you.
And most certainly whatever words you offer in prayer, even if you are absolutely clear with all your heart that you are inadequate, that you don’t have the right words to pray, that whatever words you utter in prayer when you do it anyway and when you do it afraid – especially when you do it afraid – God is there and is listening and is acting upon your prayer.
This is the time we live in, a time where we’re going to step into those, as we say in this diocese, those bold acts of justice and faith and love. We may be afraid, but we’re going to do it anyway.
