I was very disturbed to read in the news a couple of weeks ago about a Census worker found murdered in Kentucky. (You can google it. It’s gruesome.) The white census worker was found hanging from a tree in a graveyard. And this week an African American friend of mine told me that there is a noose hanging from the tree at the house next door to where she and her African husband are guests in Texas. They are there to teach and preach at a local church about the work they do helping homeless kids living on the city streets in Durban, South Africa.

These kinds of news frighten me, I admit it. And it makes me afraid of fear, because I believe that these expressions of violence spring from fear, extreme fear. I think they spring from alienation and isolation. I think they spring from people not knowing each other and not trusting each other and denying the humanity of other human beings.

And I suspect that the perpetrators of such crimes and threats of violence have had their own humanity undermined in some way. Something has created a deep vulnerability and fear in them.

How do we confront fear? How do we overcome it? It seems to me helpful for us to understand the fear inside ourselves so that we can better address and neutralize the fear in our culture. So as a first step, I try to understand how fear works in me.

When I hear these frightful stories I am at risk of falling into a pit of despair and powerlessness. I can get overwhelmed and feel afraid. There are moments when that happens to me. I fall into fear. But I know that that is exactly how fear wins. That is how fear can begin to rule the day.

So instead of surrendering to fear, I am looking for patterns of hope that are also out there in the world and present in my life. There is more than fear. There is also love and courage which springs from love. There is commitment and generosity. There is responsibility and creativity. There is community and our capacity to strengthen community.

To remember to look for and to share the patterns of hope, I started a trending topic on Twitter called #patternsofhope. I’m hoping that others will also add to it. We all need help finding the patterns that antidote fear. We also need encouragement to create new patterns. We can do it. We already are.