Don't Panic!

If you have ever seen an episode of the comedy Dad's Army, there is often a point where the character Corporal Jones runs round saying, in his panic 'Don't panic!'. DON'T PANIC also appears in another fictional series, Douglas Adams' The hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy. These words were printed on the guide in bold print “partly because the device 'looked insanely complicated' to operate and partly to keep intergalactic travellers from, well, panicking”.

Panic is a sudden strong feeling of fear that prevents reasonable thinking and acting. We must not fall into it when trouble comes. Yet so often this is our case – we are in peril on the sea, as it were, even though Jesus is right beside us. It's as if he is there but asleep and so because we fail to think straight, we fly into a panic and start crying out to him in the way that the disciples in the boat did.