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Good morning. Chinese-born Chloe Zhao won the best director award at the Oscars for her film Nomadland. In her acceptance speech, she recalled a lesson she learned from her father in childhood that has sustained her through hard times: “People at birth are inherently good. Even though sometimes it might seem like the opposite is true, I have always found goodness in the people I met, everywhere I went in the world,” she said. I thought of her words when I read about Folajimi Olubunmi-Adewole, known as Jimi – a young man who drowned when he and a friend jumped into the River Thames to save a woman who was in the water. Jimi’s father Michael told the media how proud he is of his son. “It was just like him to want to always try and help others,” he said. Jimi had tattooed on his arm the name of his murdered cousin, seventeen year old Malcolm Mide-Madariola, who was stabbed in 2018 when he tried to protect a friend who was being attacked. Malcolm’s father said that they were best friends who died in the same way – trying to save another person. This is surely evidence of that “inherent goodness” which Zhao describes. But it’s harder to believe in such inherent goodness when one reads of 130 refugees who recently drowned in the Mediterranean and reports that their distress calls were repeatedly ignored. The contrast between the treatment of those refugees and Jimi’s act of self-sacrifice to save a stranger couldn’t be greater. In different ways, these are all stories about the great diasporas of our modern world. Chloe Zhao was born in China, educated in Britain and lives in the United States. Nomadland is about a woman who loses everything and travels in her van through the American West. Jimi and Malcolm were from Nigerian families. Those drowned refugees too were seeking a place of belonging far from their countries of origin. It’s not wickedness but fear which suffocates that inherent goodness, including fear of strangers and outsiders, such as refugees. Few of us pay as high a price as Jimi and Malcolm for being good, but we all have to face down our fears in order to become the best we are capable of. The biblical author of 1 John says that “perfect love casts out fear”. The injunction “Do not be afraid” occurs hundreds of times in the Bible. For me, this means continuously asking myself what motivates me in life – love, or fear? Zhao speaks about having the courage to hold on to the goodness in ourselves and in each other. If fear is the enemy of goodness, then yes, it takes courage to be good.