The following is written by Derek Penwell, Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Church. It was first shared on Derek’s substack, Heretic Adjacent, and then on Facebook, where I came across it.
It’s both a powerful and beautiful piece, and a timely follow-up to my last Wild Reed post.
To the Ones Who Are Scared
The prophets weren’t calm folks writing in leather journals beside artisan candles, but frightened people choking on the truth and saying it anyway.
I want to talk about something that’s taken up a lot of my bandwidth, but something I haven’t really discussed much explicitly.
The thing is, a lot of us aren’t just angry right now. We’ve already burned through angry. What we are is scared. And not hypothetically concerned or vaguely unsettled. Scared deep down in the marrow, in the kind of way that’s hard to explain to people who, by luck or privilege or practiced avoidance, haven’t had to feel it yet. Terrified.
And to be honest, this isn’t the kind of fear you can manage by sheer application of will. Manageable fear comes with concrete options. Put down the phone. Take a walk. Drink some water. Breathe in for four, out for six.
Fine. That stuff can really help. So, I don’t want to discount any of that. This isn’t that.
If we’re being honest, there’s another kind of fear that doesn’t respond to better breathing, isn’t there?
You know what I’m talking about. The 3 a.m. kind of fear. The kind that sits on the edge of the bed and starts listing nightmares. Think about it. We’ve started yet another war nobody wanted, this time with Iran, which has a marginally more robust military than Ecuadorian narco-terrorists.
And if that potential nightmare weren’t enough, we have to wonder about the Epstein files and all they suggest about who gets protected in this country and why, and how it is that we became a country where the power of the U.S. government at its highest levels is drafted to shield those allegedly guilty of heinous crimes against little girls.
We have all kinds of people (citizens and other innocents) getting swept up alongside undocumented immigrants because the people with badges either can’t tell the difference or don’t care to.
Serious voices are asking serious questions about whether the 2026 elections will actually be free.
The math keeps coming out wrong, or if not wrong, then extremely unfavorable for most of us.
Let me get this out before somebody tries to hand you a motivational poster and call it theology: This isn’t catastrophizing. It’s simply paying attention. Those aren’t the same thing. In days like these, confusing the two is just another way truth gets obscured.
The prophet Habakkuk was doing advanced political math, too. He didn’t like the answer any more than we do.
“How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, 'Violence!’ but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore, the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails” (Habakkuk 1:2-4).
That’s not vague, free-floating spiritual angst. That’s a prophet watching a society unravel at the seams.
That’s someone who loves his people, standing in the wreckage of public life, watching violence and injustice go unpunished while the goons in charge cover for one another. Watching ordinary people get crushed, and then turning toward heaven with something that sounds like a scream.
I don’t know about you, but I read the prophet pour out his incredulity and fear, and I feel a little less alone.
Here’s where I need to be honest about my own inner life. I’ve spent enormous amounts of energy lately trying to turn fear into anger. Mostly, I guess, because anger feels more useful.
But at least anger has someplace to go. Anger can make the calls, write the letters, show up in the streets, refuse to look away. Anger at least feels like motion.
Fear just sits there in the dark and stares at you. Unblinking. Like some dead-eyed horror sitting across from you on an empty subway car.
But Habakkuk doesn’t give his fear a good scrubbing behind the ears, turning it into something more respectable before he brings it to God. He brings the fear and confusion. The unbearable “how-are-you-letting-this-happen?” itself.
And what I love, or maybe what I trust, is that God doesn’t tell him to calm down.
The answer Habakkuk gets is odd. Severe, even. It’s not a five-step plan for surviving the collapse of public trust or a reassurance that everything will be fine by next Tuesday. Just this: "Write the vision. Make it plain. And wait."
Bear witness. Write it down. Don’t let the truth disappear just because it’s inconvenient to the powerful or exhausting to the rest of us.
And then wait, not because waiting is easy, but because sometimes faithfulness is less about fixing what we can’t fix and more about refusing to lie about what’s going on.
I’ve been thinking about this because, frankly, it feels more honest than a lot of what passes for pastoral reassurance these days. “We’ve been through worse.” “The arc of history bends toward justice.” “Love wins.”
Well. Maybe. Sometimes. Eventually.
But at 3 a.m., when my mind is filling in the blanks of what comes next, those slogans can sound less like good news and more like religiously accessorized denial you find cross-stitched on a pillow at a Lifeway bookstore.
Habakkuk offers something truer.
Name what you see.
Tell the truth about it.
Don’t look away.
That, at least, we can do.
So here’s the permission I want to offer myself today. (If you need it, it’s for you too.)
You don’t have to make your fear useful before you bring it to God. You don’t have to be brave on command. You don’t have to manufacture optimism, or perform hope for the benefit of other anxious people, or pretend that your trembling is a failure of faith.
What you can do is what the prophets did.
Just tell the truth.
Tell the truth about what you see. Tell the truth about what it does to you. Tell the truth to God, to a trusted friend, to the soul of your own terrified five-year-old self in the dark. Name the injustice, the dread, the grief. Don’t dab perfume on it.
That’s not weakness. To the contrary, in a world that relies on our stupefaction, clarity is a form of courage.
In a culture fueled by spectacle, attention is a moral achievement.
And in a moment when so many of us are being told to doubt our own eyes, plain, honest speech is a kind of holy defiance.
The God who listened to a prophet yelling into the collapse of his own society can handle our 3 a.m. howl into the void.
God has heard this kind of prayer before . . . and God’s not afraid of the tone of our voice.
Go forward even though your courage trembles, dear ones. But go.
And if, on the way, you need to scream at God a little, go ahead. The prophets already made that road holy.
Be gentle and brave,
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Derek Penwell’s Message to Those Waking Up to Consequences They Didn’t Think Had Their Name on Them
• The Red Turtle: “A Film That Knows Exactly What It Wants to Be”
• Marianne Williamson on How to Psychologically Endure This Moment
• Love Will Not Lose
• Why “Revolutionary Love” Gives Michelle Alexander Hope
• Something to Think About – December 17, 2015
• Susan Raffo: Quote of the Day – September 11, 2012
• All ’Round Me Burdens . . .
Image 1: Saaxiib Qurux Badan (“Beautiful Friend”) by Michael J. Bayly (July 14, 2019).
Image 2: James C. Lewis From his “Icons of the Bible” photo series.
