Domain Query: Fear of the Long Dark

Here's the second of the day's Domain Query series, based on a very interesting long comment from LRFotS Kapios on my post about resilience:

It gets worse before things get better. Knowing that intellectually and feeling it to every last bone in your body is a big difference as I’ve realized.

There is one subject that I would like to see you tackle in a post sometime in the future, and that is overcoming the fear of death. Not the YOLO I’m taking cocaine and partying kind, but the one that you hear about warriors in the past who had a lot to lose, their lands, properties, families, etc. and yet they were still able to fight as if they were not attached t those things.

How do people do that? I have been thinking about this a lot with the recent trend of mandatory vaccinations.

Someone who had lived in a monastery for more than a decade told me this about a week ago: ‘The threat to lock me up and starve me to death if I don’t put the vaccine will not change my mind. I would rather die of starvation if it comes to that, because it’s my choice’.

My country has not introduced mandatory vaccination like Austria (probably because they are waiting to see what happens with other countries), but I believe the person who told me that. He is not perfect, but he and a few other people who live there have been threatened and harassed by the police, unjustly criticized by others in the past and yet, they haven’t changed their conviction.

I answer this question from the straightforward point of view of a Christian (an extremely bad one, mind you), and why Christians might fear dying - I certainly do - but not death itself. I unpack an answer rooted in Scripture, starting with Matthew 10, and drawing on references within the texts, and come to the conclusion that the way to avoid this problem of fear of death is to find something bigger than yourself, which you believe in and love enough to give your life to protect. That is the way out of this dilemma.