Mark 6:50 Meaning For They All Saw Him

The mind so accustomed to fear will meet even its own salvation with alarm, mistaking the presence of love for one more threat rising out of the dark. What troubles here is not the figure drawing near but the terror the mind projects onto everything it has not yet recognized, so that rescue itself looks like danger until it is known. The answer to such fear is not proof or argument but the quiet assurance that what approaches is not other and not against, that the very thing dreaded is the love the mind had forgotten was its own.

Fear ends not when the outer scene changes but when the mind recognizes what was always there and never hostile. Be not afraid is the whole correction, for once love is seen for what it is, there is nothing left in the darkness to dread.

Fear has a way of arriving in the dark hours, when the mind, left alone, turns every shape into a threat. You lie there and the imagined future crowds in, and the trouble feels enormous, and what is most frightening is often not any actual danger but the sheer aloneness of being trapped inside a terrified stream of thought. The waters rise, and you are sure you are on your own with them.

Then sometimes, unbidden, a stillness speaks underneath the fear, and it says, in effect, do not be afraid, I am here. This presence is not a rescuer arriving from outside. It is the awareness you have been overlooking, the calm depth in you that the storm of thinking cannot reach and has never once disturbed. When you turn toward it, even in the worst hour, the fear does not vanish so much as lose its grip, because you are no longer identified with the frightened mind. You have found the one in you that was never troubled, the quiet ground on which even the roughest water can do nothing but move.

Men on dark water in a rising wind are the picture of the soul overtaken by chaos. What terrifies them most is the shape they cannot name moving toward them across the deep. The unknown wears a threatening face until it speaks. Fear turns every approaching thing into an enemy.

Then comes the voice, and the voice does two things at once. It says be of good cheer, and it says be not afraid, but between them it says who it is. Naming steadies. What could not be identified could only be dreaded, and the moment it is known the terror drains out of it. Face the thing on the water long enough to learn its name, and the fear of it loosens its grip on you.