Remembering D-Day

"What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee."  Psalm 56:3

Psalm 56:3 was the first Bible verse I memorized at age five.   My mother sent me to Vacation Bible School at the First Baptist Church of Enterprise, Alabama and it was there I learned this verse by heart. I don't know what I had to be afraid of at five years old, but it must have been something since the verse still impacts me today.

I thought about this verse when I read the interview with 100 year old Rose Jackson of Summerville, Georgia.  Today as we acknowledge the 74th anniversary of the Normandy  invasion, commonly known as D-Day.  She said something in that interview that I thought had something to do with me. Rose was an army nurse at the 5th evacuation hospital behind enemy lines during D-Day. She said over those several days they treated over 25,000 wounded and dying soldiers.  But this is what got to me. "Even behind the battle, we'd still hear the bombs in the distance and, occasionally, one one hit nearby, but there was no time to be afraid."

Fear is a natural response to life events and circumstances.  We are hard wired for fear. The fear mechanisms in our brain are in our oldest reptilian part of our brain.  In Dan Gardner's The Science of Fear, he says that although fear is a natural response, we fear the wrong things. He uses as examples that we fear cancer, but don't fear heart disease.  He points out that more people die of heart related illnesses each year in the US and that it concerns us, but we don't have nearly the level of fear and dread that we have for cancer.  Other statistics he offers  are that we have a horrid fear of snakes and spiders.  He says we shouldn't fear bites from reptiles and arachnids, because less than ten people die of either one each year in the US.  On the other hand we should fear mosquitoes which cause over a million deaths world-wide each year. These tiny creatures not only cause death, but some horrible painful and debilitating diseases.

My late father-in-law, a veteran of World War II, had a deathly fear of thunderstorms. Once during the war, a Japanese war plane dropped seven bombs on the beach where he was camped. The next morning as he stepped off the craters from the shore to his tent, the eighth bomb would have hit his tent.  Can you imagine how loud those bombs were a few feet from where he had been asleep? He had good reason to fear lightning and thunder.

I have my own issues with fear. And so do you. But we would all do well to heed the advice of the psalmist David, "When we're afraid, we should trust in God."  We should also consider the experience of Rose Jackson, "There was no time to be afraid."

It's interesting the things that help us with our fears.  One of my phobias is getting lost in a big city. I related an experience of getting lost in Atlanta to my counselor and she said, "You weren't lost. You knew where you were all along. You were in Atlanta, a city about 90 miles south of here". Amazingly, I have found great comfort in that.

Although she didn't say so in the interview, Rose Jackson probably had plenty of time to be afraid after the war.  But hopefully she, like David, and all of us, can not have time for fear. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself,"  But left unchecked phobophobia,  the fear of fear, can be a terrible thing. "What time I am afraid?"  With effort and help, no time.