Unrushing

What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?

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Ask most people what scared them as a kid and they’ll say a horror movie, or a book they weren’t supposed to read. Mine was the Bible. 

It sounds like an odd answer, but I mean it. The violent parts stayed with me far longer than any film could. There is a lot of violence in there, and as a child I had no way of putting it in context. I just read it the way a child reads anything, as if it were simply true and simply happening. Armageddon was the worst of it. The idea that the world would end, that there would be a final battle, that everything I knew could be swept away. A horror movie ends. You turn off the screen, the lights come on, and you remind yourself it’s made up. This was different. It was presented as real and as something that was coming, and I couldn’t switch it off. 

What I notice now is how heavy that is to a young mind. Children don’t have the tools to read symbolism or history or metaphor. They take the words at face value. So the fear wasn’t really about the stories being gruesome. It was about believing the stories were eventually coming true.  

I don’t write this to knock the book or anyone’s faith. I’ve come to see more in those pages than fear, and I understand now that much of it was never meant to be read the way I read it at that age. But I think it’s worth admitting that something sacred can still frighten a child, and that the fear can be real even when the intention behind it was good. 

It also left me with a lasting sensitivity to how much we absorb when we’re young, and how slowly some of it loosens its grip. Part of living more deliberately, for me, has been going back to what shaped me and looking at it with calmer eyes. The fear hasn’t vanished completely, but it no longer runs the room. 

So that’s my answer. Not a haunted house or a horror film, but the most widely read book in the world, read by a kid who took every word literally.