Unafraid by Benjamin L. Corey

Author:Benjamin L. Corey [Corey, Benjamin L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2017-11-06T23:00:00+00:00

It Has Never Been About Escaping

This moment perhaps more than any other became a turning point in my journey. When I let go of those horrific end times, I came to better appreciate how those of us with fundamentalist backgrounds have lots of baggage—baggage that we at times don’t even know we’re carrying. The subconscious desire to escape to someplace better instead of really embracing the present moment for what it has to offer is one of those pieces of baggage that sticks with us even after we relinquish what we no longer believe about the end times. We can reject bad theology without recognizing and rejecting the bad implications of that theology; that takes time and self-awareness to sort out, but it is a critical step that we must do. And when we do it, we stumble upon an invitation that is far better than the invitation to escape: we are given the invitation to steer our stories, and even the story of the whole world, to a more beautiful ending than we previously dared to dream.

A while back I took my then thirteen-year-old daughter Johanna to see the Disney movie Tomorrowland. In this movie I unexpectedly stumbled upon a perfect illustration of the unintended consequences of embracing fear-based eschatology versus a hope-filled view of the future. The movie’s leading character is Casey Newton, and whenever Casey touches a lapel pin with the letter T on it, she instantly finds herself transported to a world called Tomorrowland. For dreamers like Casey, Tomorrowland is an alternate plane of reality where dreamers and thinkers have gathered together to build and create whatever they can imagine—it is a land full of beauty and new creation.

But as Casey soon discovers, with the help of Frank Walker, the technological advances in Tomorrowland have somewhat backfired, as the Tomorrowland dreamers had built a future-telling machine. This future-telling machine was foretelling the unavoidable and soon-to-unfold end of the world. The machine was also broadcasting that signal to those outside of Tomorrowland, causing their unconscious minds to soak in the message that the world is heading in a progressively worse direction, leading them to believe that nothing can be done to stop it. To this point in time, all of the dreamers and thinkers of Tomorrowland had found themselves unable to figure out how to avoid the end of the world—the clock was ticking in their minds, and nothing was going to be able to stop a destructive future from unfolding. The machine was broadcasting fear, and fear has a way of freezing people until they stand still and passively allow the messages of fear to come true.

The climactic moment of the movie is when Casey flat-out rejects the prediction of the world’s end and simply refuses to believe it—becoming the first official dreamer to discard the doom-and-gloom narrative being spit out by the future-telling machine. Casey eventually confronts the leadership of Tomorrowland and essentially asks, “What if this machine isn’t foretelling the future but is instead

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