Exotic invasives. In biological circles this means plants, animals, insects that come from outside an ecological zone that have no natural enemies and so they multiply at an alarming rate, choking out or destroying the native flora and fauna. Such things as Japanese beetles expanding throughout the Northeast U.S. that eat up fruits, vegetables, flowers, grass, and trees, kudzu vines from S.E. Asia that grow so aggressively in the U.S. that they cover, climb, and smother any other growing or non-growing thing, and boa constrictors multiplying like wildfire in the everglades eating native birds and animals and growing to enormous size, fit into this category.

Exotic invasives are a good metaphor for ways of thinking that can multiply aggressively and choke out or smother productive thinking and action when unchecked. Like the baby pythons introduced into the everglades years ago, they may start out small and seem harmless, but with no resistance or eradication, they can grow quickly out of control. Fear is an example of a mental exotic invasive, along with its companions: worry, anxiety, prejudice, blame, accusation, hatred, self righteousness, and self pity.

“God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind,” we learn from the Bible. You might say that what God has given us is our native mental landscape and out-of-control fear, which God has not given us, is an exotic invasive. Not being our natural inclination we might find ourselves at first not knowing how to resist or eradicate it. But, like the biological invasives, we need to learn quickly how to do so, or fear will take over our mental landscape.

The story of Adam and Eve illustrates how this works. Adam and Eve live in Eden, a heavenly garden full of beautiful and fruitful plants. They have everything they need. But along comes a serpent, “which was more subtle than ANY beast of the field which the lord GOD had made.” Could it be that the serpent is something the lord God has not made or intended to be in the garden—an exotic invasive? Moreover, it plants a little serpenty fear in Eve’s thought: the fear of missing out on something. It says, “There’s a fruit you haven’t tried and there is wisdom you don’t have. You are so missing out.” If Eve bites, she now has two exotic invasives: the serpent and the fear.

Interestingly, fear of missing out is so common today that it has even engendered an acronym for busy texters: “FOMO.”  FOMO is to blame for many a lack of commitment. “If I commit to this, I will miss that,” so the thinking goes. If I choose to go to this event or marry this person or take that job or move to this city, I will miss out on a lot of other opportunities. And so, FOMO keeps us from accepting great opportunities that cross our paths and we, in a sense, exclude ourselves from paradise.

Eve didn’t know how to handle these invasives and so they grew into more aggressive forms. The serpent grew into a great red dragon at the end of the Bible and the fear of missing out grew into every kind of fear and its effects–terror, hate, lack,  futility, disease, sorrow, torture, and death. Before they bite, Adam and Eve don’t recognize the devastating consequences of FOMO. They actually do miss out on a life in paradise because their choices exclude them. Which is just how this invasive fear works—it seems to attract the very feared thing right into experience.

From the tiny seedling of FOMO comes a twining, smothering vine of fears—fear of lack, fear of loss, fear of others—that fruits into aggressive anger, complaint, blame, shame, prejudice, hate, killing. In Adam and Eve’s story, the next generation was in such desperate competition that one son rose up and killed the other —and then complained bitterly of punishment.

The lessons of biological invasives are the same lessons we must learn with mental invasives. First, detect them. Then recognize that they are not our native, God-given thought patterns. They are not really us. Next we must match their assertiveness in eradicating them from our mental thought-fields, and lastly we must keep a close watch that new seedlings don’t sprout up. Other local thought-fields such as media, politics, entertainment, science, spread the seeds of exotic invasives constantly, so we must stay on guard not to let one reestablish itself in our mental garden.

Sometimes the fruit of fear has been so long in our landscape that we feel it is native. But if we can see the negative consequences in our life of worry, anger, blame, shame then we need to detect these ways of thinking and understand that they don’t really belong in our mental ecosystem. First by detecting and next by rejecting them, we can have a more heavenly existence on earth.