I’ve seen various types of hand-wringing over the past week about governments and militaries and potential power grid disruptions. I watched one video, and then social media began showing me a different side of the internet, where cowboy hat- wearing men hand out “top secret insider knowledge” from the front seat of their pickup trucks. In fact, I saw individuals from all sides of the political spectrum worrying out loud about how much water they should have on hand, how many weeks’ worth of prescriptions, how many canned goods and what types of communication devices would be best.
In all of this, I saw various shades of fear–some seemed confident in their ability to survive when the apocalypse arrives. Others seemed to be nervously making lists and stockpiling and looking over their shoulder for the boogeyman. Who knows how many others are watching those videos who are living in fear for their families, waiting for the worst to happen while they continue to make sandwiches for their children and sit in the pickup line at school and go through all the usual routines.
I myself am known by those close to me as a fearer. I’m good at imagining horrible scenarios, and even had a moment this week when my mind conjured the image of an upcoming trip going horribly wrong via some sort of world-wide situation that would leave me separated from my family by thousands of miles. Still, in my heart of hearts I’m a fearful optimist, generally believing that things will go better than expected. So if you want to know how many canned goods I’ve collected, the answer is: the ole cupboard is pretty bare.
We fear the unknown. We don’t want our families to go through hard things, or to get hurt or suffer or die. Of course we don’t. We ourselves don’t want to go through hard things either, or to get hurt or suffer or die. It’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of evil world leaders or government plots. But there is something more fearful still, which is “to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).
There’s a reality that many Christians are missing as we ruminate about power outages and rumors of war. Like the rest of the world, we default to fears about our kids’ safety. It’s good and noble to care for our families and watch over our children–I’m not at all saying otherwise. But when we pray about our fears, we shouldn’t be singularly focused on physical safety. As Christians, our minds and hearts should quickly turn to the lost of this world, the lost on our very own streets in our own hometowns, where if someday the very worst happens and large numbers of our neighbors are sent to eternity, many would be most fearfully judged on the merit of their own works in this life, instead of on the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ.
When we hear murmurings of bad things on the horizon, when the men in pickup trucks start getting us all worked up, when the doomsday preppers get our ear, we must pray with all our hearts that our first thoughts are for the millions of souls in this world who don’t know Jesus, whose best days are right now, with only dread and doom ahead. We should be filled with a sense of urgency for our neighbors to experience true salvation so they have hope for a peace and perfection in eternity with Jesus.
It’s easy to be motivated by fearful things that we hear about the state of this world, but that motivation should cause us to think past our own four walls and our own family. Instead of just wringing our hands and making our stockpile lists, will we be moved to pray for our neighbors, to speak words of truth to them, to offer hope to a lost and dying world? What if revival could start right here, in our own cities and towns, because people who saw some pretty scary talk on the internet became consumed with the idea that our neighbors need much more than canned goods?
Maybe this next week I’ll get some jugs of water and some green beans, and I’ll listen to some experts tell me how to set my family up for survival if something catastrophic does come our way. Heaven knows we won’t be tempted toward the green beans unless it’s all we have left. But more than that, I want to see this world, and especially my own community, with spiritual eyes like never before. This fearful optimist is beginning to see an opportunity for the church here, not to rally behind a political candidate or to teach stockpiling 101, but to plead with the souls of the fearful people around us, to show them who Christ is, to contend with the darkness and shine as much light as we can. We don’t have time to wring our hands when the harvest is this plentiful. Where are the workers?
