The Surgeon Believed in Heaven and Was Still Afraid to Die

Eastern Congo is living through the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, declared in mid-May and driven by a strain with no approved vaccine or cure. It has already killed hundreds. Peter Stafford, a surgeon at a mission hospital there, caught the virus within days of it reaching his wards. He had left a comfortable life to operate on the region's poorest patients, certain that death was a defeated enemy. Then it was in his own blood, and he found he was simply scared. Evacuated to Berlin and treated with experimental antibodies, he survived, and admitted afterward that he had not handled the fear as well as he hoped.

There is a version of faith that sells fearlessness as proof you believe enough. Scripture does not. The line Stafford clung to was written by David while enemies held him captive. It does not say if I am afraid; it says when. The fear is assumed. Trust is what you do with your hands while they shake. Centuries later, a man knelt in a garden and asked for the cup to pass before he drank it.

You will meet your own edge: a scan, a phone call, a night you cannot pray yourself calm. The verse does not lift the fear off you, but your faith in Him does. It gives you somewhere to put your weight while you tremble. Stafford's fear was real, and his trust was too. They were never each other's enemy, and yours need not be either.