frenzy

Soccer is one of the greatest loves in the lives of my sons, so I come by the title “soccer mom” quite honestly. When the weather becomes too frigid to play outside, my basement walls take a beating. Needless to say, the cracks and holes are growing in girth as February drags into a seemingly endless winter. Luckily for my drywall, however, some of the boys’ energy is expended at various indoor facilities. One such facility is simply a basketball gym that is temporarily transformed into a futsal court for two twenty-minute halves. If you have never heard of futsal, don’t worry. You are in the majority; at least in America! Futsal is a 5 v. 5 soccer-based game that is played with a smaller, heavier ball on a hard court where it is easily kicked out of bounds. The game forces players to hone their skills of speed, agility, accurate passing, and fast footwork.

Because of the accelerated pace of the game, futsal scores can run much higher than typical soccer matches. When your team is responsible for the larger number on the scoreboard, it’s quite exhilarating. However, if they are losing by a decent margin, the game quickly begins to feel like a beating. When a team falls behind by roughly 4 or more goals, you will begin to witness a mad frenzy of activity that only hinders the losing team even further.

At this hazy threshold of 4 goals, give or take, a previously sound, intelligent team can lapse into a frenetic group of players whose mistakes increase exponentially as the clock counts down. They get fearful, they panic, and they make terrible decisions, failing to connect passes and shooting out of desperation rather than strategically working the ball toward the goal as they have so meticulously been taught to do.

Sometimes they even lash out in frustration at one another. “Why are we shooting?!” “What kind of pass was that?!” On the sidelines, parents are wondering, What happened to our kids? This does not look like our team—they’ve forgotten everything they know!  Once controlled and level-headed, their fear of losing has driven them to wildly compulsive action.

Frenzy is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as follows:

1 a. a temporary madness

   b. a violent mental or emotional agitation

2. intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity

This phenomenon of frenzy is certainly not isolated to an athletic team who is feeling the effects of a poorly played game. When any circumstance in life elicits fear or panic, our intellectual switch often flips to the OFF position while frenetic energy holds us hostage, thanks to a sudden onslaught of adrenaline coursing through our arteries. In an instant, we forget everything we know to be true, we lose sight of rationality and we rush our decisions, only making matters worse. Sometimes we even erupt in anger at those closest to us.

The Bible is full of stories of people reacting in fear, trading rational thought for panic. Take the spies that Moses sent into Canaan to inspect the Promised Land (Num. 13). After 40 days on mission to gather every morsel of intel they could muster, the twelve spies return to debrief. Ten of them give Moses the report that the land is indeed flowing with milk and honey, but the inhabitants are too terrifying and the cities are too well fortified. Only Caleb and Joshua provide a dissenting opinion and urge the Israelites to trust the Lord and move forward in capturing the land.

Even so, the ten naysayers instill such fear into the hearts of the Israelite population that they are ready to stone Caleb and Joshua. As Caleb will later say when he is 85 years old, “my brothers who went up with me made the heart of the people melt; yet I wholly followed the Lord my God” (Josh. 14:8). The Lord intervenes and threatens to blot out the entire congregation, but Moses begs the Lord to spare them. God grants Moses’ request, but He enacts a strict measure of discipline: no Israelite of that entire generation will enter the Promised Land, and they will wander in the desert for 40 years, one year for every day of the spy campaign. The ten spies do not fare so well; they “died by plague before the Lord” (Num. 14:37). Caleb and Joshua, however, are exempt from punishment as the Lord sweetly blesses them for their faithfulness.

The Israelites allowed fear to take root in their hearts. It blotted out their sense of reason, blinding them to the mighty promises of God. It had been less than two years since the Lord miraculously lead them out of slavery in Egypt, parted the Red Sea, made contaminated water drinkable, fed them with manna from heaven, and produced water from a rock, but all it took was a frightful story about formidable enemies to make them forget all they knew to be true. They lost sight of what they knew about God—He keeps His promises. They nearly became murderers because of their frenzy.

In the New Testament, we learn that the disciples flee when Jesus is betrayed by Judas and placed under arrest (Mt. 26:56). What happened to these men who had lived three years of their lives in Jesus’ constant company, hanging on the very words that he spoke, taking them to heart and leaving all else behind to follow him? What happened to Peter who boldly declared, “You are the Christ”? (Mk. 8:29). By the end of the night, he denies Jesus three times.

Fear consumed the hearts of the disciples that fateful night, and in the frenzy, they did what they did not think themselves capable of doing—they abandoned their Lord and took to hiding.

When we panic and adrenaline spikes, our emotional brain temporarily hijacks our cognitive brain, causing us to make impulsive decisions. When I was a teenager, I once screamed so loudly you would have thought Hannibal Lecter had just entered my room. What was the actual culprit? A wolf spider.  A measly, little arachnid. Although the perpetrator was at least ten feet away from me and ten thousand times smaller than me, I will never forget how hard my heart was pounding as I recoiled in fear. My emotion overtook reason, and I still cringe as I recall how frenetic I became when those hairy legs slowly emerged from the vent in my wall. 

On a far more consequential note, when I suffered from anxiety and depression, I was stuck in a fear cycle during which time my stress hormones were perpetually elevated. My thinking was cloudy, my decision-making stunted, my emotions desperate and my rationality gassed. Without immersing myself in God’s Word, I quite literally could not recall the basic realities I knew to be true about Him.

Whether silly or serious, the frenzy we experience as part of the human condition often leads to rash actions. Those actions that land on the serious side of the spectrum bear heavy ramifications, too heavy for us to carry on our own. I am fully convinced that the Word of God is our lifeline.

As 1 John 4:18 says, “perfect love casts out fear.” Caleb knew the path that would quell the fear—trusting the perfect love of God and His promises. The disciples found their freedom from fear when they encountered the risen Jesus, the personification of perfect love. The Word made flesh was quite literally their road back to life. We do not even have to lay eyes on Jesus to inherit this beautiful promise—all we have to do is believe. Jesus will conquer the frenzy every time.

When we hit that threshold where the score seems to be completely in our enemy’s favor, we need to hold fast to the promise that the battle has already been won. May we have the steadfast faith of Caleb and Joshua, but in the moments when we fail to trust, I pray we are reminded that Jesus provides restoration and brings us back to life.

Futsal frenzy. We (the black team) were luckily on the winning side this time!