Faith In The Face of Fear

Our brains have chemical reactions to fear. The amygdala is a part of the brain that activates when we sense a threat stimulus and prompts the body to have a physical response, like the “release of stress hormones and sympathetic nervous system.” The hippocampus is closely related to the amygdala and helps our brains interpret the threat. For example, seeing a lion is likely to provoke a fear response in the brain, but that response is tempered by the existence of a thick glass wall in a zoo (Arash Javanbakht and Linda Saab, What Happens in the Brain When We Feel Fear, Smithsonian, October 27, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happens-brain-feel-fear180966992/). That tempering is what our faith in God is supposed to do, operate as an instinctive grid through which we view fearful events or circumstances, reining in our responses with the knowledge that he is in control.