Dealing with fear by personal thoughts of faith and love; not via groupism, nor with optimism, pride, or safety-seeking

People always want to know "what to do" - and this need is used to manipulate us.

Because all the standard available notions of "doing good" and improving-the-world are long since captured and put to work for strategic evil...

But, of course, we really do need to know what to do! 

There's always a lot of the sin of fear about; it is infectious and people also have a tendency to seek it (a misplaced sense of "duty" to face the "reality" of "the worst" (in practice, "the worst" as interpreted and presented by the mass media) and overcome it. 

Chronic, existential fear isn't something that can be avoided or eradicated (at least, not for those capable of the experience). 

Yet we do genuinely need to overcome; we need to deal with fear; so we need to consider how to deal with it.

Typical wrong ways of dealing with fear include optimism - adopting a belief that the feared thing cannot or will not happen; or pride - that if it does happen, I personally (and my gang) can overcome it. 

Another wrong way is to seek safety from the feared - to flee it, or defend against it. 

These are bad ways of dealing with fear; because they are negative, they try to use one sin to fight another. 

Thus - optimism is dishonest, pride is this-worldly, safety is impossible in this mortal earthly life... 

Others fight fear by trying to build protective alliances, "groups" - with the implication that fear is something we collectively intend to defeat, sometime in the future, so long as we can persuade or coerce other people to join un in the fight...

But fear needs to be fought immediately - not in the future, and this means fought by each person as-he-now-is, and individually. 

We must take personal responsibility to do what is needed, without delaying for conditions to improve.  

The first faith required is that God would not leave us without the necessary resources. So anybody and everywhere can do what is needed - it's a matter of knowing what. 

Also, the answer will be (must be) for individuals and not dependent on social factors, will be immediate, can be consciously adopted - and is a matter of free action. 

The answer is therefore going to be neither hard nor abstract - and shall be within anyone's grasp who chooses it. 

Since we know that the answer must be possible to happen individually, immediately, and therefore directly. 

It's pretty well-known among Christians that we should fight fear with love and faith (a loving kind of faith, faith in the ultimate power of love).

But people get hung-up on exactly what such action means in practice, here-and-now...

For instance; faith is usually weak, and often weak because external in source, self-contradicting, and neither grasped nor inwardly endorsed. 

Faith will not overcome fear unless is real and strong to us personally, which means experientially. 

And of course Christian faith needs to be in God the creator, known as personal, parental, and good (not, therefore, faith another kind of God with other characteristics) 

Love is the basis of divine creation; and love cannot be dictated - therefore to be effective for good, love must be genuine. 

We can only make a positive difference for that which we really love. 

And as for action - the false assumption of our materialist civilization is that action must be physical to be effective; whereas if action is to be individual and immediate - then such action needs to be known as spiritual not physical; and thinking recognized as (potentially) an action that affects divine creation. 

So it is possible for any person to do positive good for whatever and whoever he really loves, and almost instantly; by thinking upon the subject on the above lines. 

But the needful will probably only click, and happen, pretty briefly...

Because the conditions necessary are rather delicate. And what it is that happens is known primarily by direct apprehension; rather than indirectly via images, words, concepts and the like...

Description and communication come after the needful has happened, and will be approximate at best - that should be expected, and not regarded as a weakness or refutation of what has happened. 

All of which also needs a kind of faith in the way that "things work" in divine creation  - by love and spiritually - also, faith that God will take notice and incorporate what brief yet significant good we may accomplish in such ways.