Derek Penwell’s Message to the Ones Who Are Scared

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.

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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,

– Derek Penwell
via social media
March 3, 2026

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.

Derek Penwell’s Message to Those Waking Up to Consequences They Didn’t Think Had Their Name on Them

The following is written by Derek Penwell, Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Church. It’s an open letter that Penwell first shared this piece on his substack, Heretic Adjacent, and then on Facebook, where I came across it.

On one level, this piece is for all of us living in the U.S. at this profoundly troubling time – something especially felt through Penwell’s call for each one of us to “be gentle and brave.” Yet at the same time and in particular, Penwell is imparting a very direct message to those “waking up to consequences they thought had someone else’s name on them.”

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Friends,

Christmas is over now.

The music has faded, the manger scenes are being boxed up, and the country is stumbling back into ordinary time with a hangover nobody planned for. For some of you, that hangover isn’t just emotional. It’s the price of utilities. It’s the cost of medication your insurance no longer covers. It’s the neighbor who didn’t come home from work last week because ICE got there first. It’s the small business bleeding out because tariffs turned your supply chain into a hostage situation.

You’re waking up to consequences you didn’t think had your name on them.

You were told this would hurt “those” people. You know, the immigrants. The “illegals.” The queer kids who needed to be put back in their place. The women who wanted too much. The professors and librarians and “elites” who supposedly looked down on you. The cities. The coasts. The people who didn’t go to your church or vote like your family.

They told you the damage would be targeted, efficient, deserved.

You believed the suffering would be contained to people who had it coming.

And now you’re realizing it isn’t contained at all . . . unless, of course, you’ve got a couple billion you dropped in the couch cushions.

I want to say this carefully.

I’m not interested in gloating. Schadenfreude is cheap, and it rots the soul. I’m not going to mock your fear or dismiss your anger or tell you that you deserve everything you’re facing. Pain is pain. Fear is fear. Losing your footing in a system you trusted is genuinely destabilizing, regardless of who you are and whose team colors you’re wearing.

But I’m also not going to lie to you.

This. All this stuff unleashed on the world, it didn’t come out of nowhere.

But you’re in good company. The ground you’re standing on now is the same ground others have been standing on for a long time. Immigrant families have been holding their breath at every traffic stop for years. Queer teenagers have been calculating which parts of themselves to hide since middle school. Black parents have been having “the talk” about police encounters for generations. Disabled people have been fighting for scraps of a healthcare system that treats them like a budget problem. Women have been watching their bodies become legislative territory long before you noticed the court was stacked.

People told you what would happen. They tried to warn you. Some of you called them hysterical. Some of you called them divisive, said they were exaggerating, playing victim, making everything political.

Now you know, they weren’t just pushing leftover liberal talking points.

Here’s the hard truth most people never want to hear: cruelty never stays loyal. It doesn’t honor its contracts or keep its promises about who it will and won’t harm. It always widens its focus, looking for new bodies. So, eventually, it always finds its way home.

That’s not me being punitive. That’s me describing social/political/economic gravity.

The prophet Amos saw it clearly. “Let justice roll down like waters,” he thundered. But he also warned about what happens when it doesn’t. When we deny justice to the poor at the gate, when we trample the needy and push aside the afflicted, the whole vineyard withers. Not just their part of the vineyard. The whole damn vineyard. Because injustice isn’t a precision instrument. It’s poison dumped in the water table.

I get that some of you are angry right now. You feel betrayed by folks you thought cared about people like you, when it turns out they didn’t. And it makes sense. You were promised protection, told that their accumulation of strength meant someone else would absorb the pain. They sold you a story where order could be restored by sacrificing the right people.

But here’s the part of the story left out: once you decide some lives are expendable, you’ve already agreed that all lives are conditional. Including you, your kids, and your sweet aunt Mable, who never did anything wrong to anybody. Nobody’s safe.

I need to say something else, and I’m going to say it in as gentle a way as I know how:

Your pain doesn’t erase your participation.

You don’t get to pretend you were merely an observer because the outcome wound up surprising you. Advocacy for cruelty still counts, even if the blast radius expanded farther than you anticipated.

The ballot you cast, the policy you defended (or ignored), the joke you laughed at, the cruelty you explained away because it was pointed at someone you’d been taught doesn’t require your respect: all of it still happened. And me saying that isn’t an attack. It’s the beginning of honesty.

And honesty is the only place repentance can actually start.

The biblical word for repentance is metanoia. It doesn’t mean feeling really bad. It doesn’t mean groveling or self-flagellation. It means a complete reorientation, a turning around so thorough that you end up walking in the opposite direction. It means telling the truth about what you were willing to tolerate as long as it didn’t cost you too much. It means resisting the urge to rewrite your own history now that that history’s become a sore spot.

Repentance also means this: none of us gets to skip to the reconciliation scene without passing through accountability first. You don’t get to show up in the communities where your people lit a match and expect a hero’s welcome for finally noticing the fire. The people who’ve been burning this whole time don’t owe you cookies for showing up with a bucket.

But here’s the good news, if you're still here and you’re still willing to hear it.

This moment doesn’t have to harden you.

It can either calcify into resentment, a new grievance that finds new scapegoats, or it can crack open into something braver: solidarity that isn’t transactional. A refusal to build safety on somebody else’s suffering. A recognition that none of us gets to choose whose dignity counts without eventually paying for that choice.

If you want a bridge forward, it won’t be built out of denial. It will be built out of shared vulnerability and changed allegiance—not to a man or a party. And certainly not to the illusion that we can manage cruelty without becoming its collateral damage.

So what does that look like, practically?

I think it looks like showing up at a school board meeting to defend the teacher you once side-eyed for having a Pride flag in her classroom.

It looks like calling your congressman about ICE enforcement in your community, even though your family doesn’t have to worry about that . . . yet.

It looks like telling your uncle at the next holiday dinner that you were wrong, actually, and you’re not going to laugh at those jokes anymore.

It looks like giving money to the bail fund, the immigrant legal defense organization, and the clinic that’s still open.

It looks like saying out loud, in rooms where it costs you something: “I helped make this. And I’m done.”

After Christmas, the story Christians tell is no longer about cherubic angels and shepherds in bathrobes, but about a child who grows up under military occupation, who tells the truth about power until power does him to death, and who even on the cross refuses to call down the legions that could save him. The God we meet in Jesus doesn’t secure safety through domination. That God absorbs the violence of empire and breaks its power by refusing to return it.

That story is still on the table.

But it asks something of us.

It asks us to stop calculating who deserves protection and start practicing it as if everyone does . . . because they do.

This story challenges us to stop confusing our anger with innocence. To let this moment teach us what it’s been trying to teach us all along: that the only future worth having is one where nobody’s disposable.

I know it’s difficult. But if you’re willing to begin there, you won’t be alone. There are communities already doing this work, already practicing the politics of the Beatitudes instead of the culture war. And they’ve been at this for a while. They’ll make room for you. But you’ll need to come ready to listen more than you speak. Ready to follow instead of lead. Ready to sit with the discomfort of being the newcomer in a struggle others have been waging for years.

That will cost you something.

That’s how you’ll know it’s real.

Be gentle and brave.

– Derek Penwell
via social media
December 30, 2025

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Doing What We Can to Stop Unjust Arrests of Immigrants
• Susie Hayward on What’s Happening in Minneapolis
• Photo of the Day – December 5, 2025
• Omar Fateh: Quote of the Day – December 4, 2025
• James Greenberg on Trumpism: “The Tactics Are Unmistakable”
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like”
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – June 20, 2025
• The Declaration of Resistance
• The Choice Before Us
• James Greenberg: “The Choices We Make Matter”
• Derek Johnson on the “Courage to Call Fascism by Its Name”
• An Incident That Feels “Ripped from a Dystopian Novel”
• James Greenberg: “I Am in Mourning for America”

Opening image: ICE agents and federal officers detain a migrant as he walks out from a hearing during targeted detainment at a U.S. immigration court in Manhattan, October 27, 2025. (Photo: Reuters / David “Dee” Delgado)