JUSTIN CAMP

5 min read ⭑

David French, columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote something that caught my eye and has since captured my imagination. His column was mostly about politics, but what grabbed me was his contention that our national mood might be undergoing a tectonic shift. If he’s right, that’s a big deal.

But before we look at where we might be going, let’s consider where we’ve been.

For the past decade or so, our national mood has been characterized by fear. We’ve been scared to death for our health, our jobs, our retirements and the security of our families and communities. COVID compounded things tremendously, for sure, but so did all the less-than-principled people in traditional media, social media and the political arena. Perceiving that we were afraid writ small, influencers and demagogues and scoundrels sought to make us afraid writ large — for their own gain.

People and entities with diverse and conflicting agendas, hostile nation-states included, dumped fear-inducing tweets and posts on us in massive numbers. And because of our already anxious mindset, we clicked and clicked and read and read, reinforcing our existing fears and stoking new, even graver, perhaps phantom ones.

And news editors and cable news executives, struggling in an increasingly digital and difficult-to-monetize world, sold their integrity to sell subscriptions — not all, but way too many did. And because stories of imminent threat and impending doom were capturing the most eyeballs, they pumped out those pieces with opportunistic abandon.

Then, at the expense of talking about issues and ideas, politicians at every level told us repeatedly that everything we hold dear would come to an inevitable and irreversible end if we voted the wrong way. Why? Because they believed it? A little, perhaps. But mostly because, again, due to our collective fearfulness and suspicion, it’s been easier to raise money and get elected when you said things like that.

So that’s where we’re coming from: spiraling together in fear. But before we return to French’s shift and start considering where we might be headed, here’s an interesting mental/spiritual exercise that will be helpful as we do those things:

Jesus is our guide through any tangle and turmoil. He’s always the starting point for any analysis. How he goes is how we must. His reactions and decisions are the models for ours. Therefore, a most crucial question for people like you and me is always this:

Is Jesus worried about this thing I’m so worried about? Is he fretting right now like I am?

How would you answer?

Bill Gaultiere is a psychologist and an ordained pastor (and a Rapt alum). He was mentored by the eminent philosopher Dallas Willard and now runs a ministry named Soul Shepherding with his wife, Kristi. He tells a famous story about worry:

One day I was having lunch with Dallas Willard and he asked me, “If you had one word to describe Jesus what would it be?” How would you answer that question? If you could only use one word to describe Jesus what would it be?

Words for Jesus started running through my mind and out my mouth: Love… Compassion … Holy … Lord … Teacher … Risen … Healer … (These are all good words to describe Jesus.)

As he so often did in my conversations with him, Dallas waited quietly for me to keep thinking. He was unhurried. I was drawn into his silent prayer.

Finally, I asked, “Dallas, what’s your word for Jesus?” He smiled, “Relaxed.”

Do you believe that’s true?

Let’s back up and look at what we know. When God sent his Son into this world two thousand years ago, Jesus encountered a people who were a lot like us. He found a world in crisis, just like ours.

Henry Ironside, a preacher and theologian who pastored Moody Church in Chicago from 1929 to 1948, described the period as a “troublous time.” “The voice of inspiration,” he wrote, “had ceased.” After Malachi, the last of the Old Testament prophets, the Jewish people had no revelatory voice, and this lasted for four centuries until Jesus arrived — four hundred years of silence.

With no one telling them of God’s goodness and love, the people of Judea, Samaria, Galilee and the surrounding regions devolved into quarreling sects, each claiming authority to interpret Scripture. And these sects drifted from God. Some became self-righteous and hypocritical, more interested in rules and rituals; others became aloof and unbelieving, more interested in power and worldly pleasures.

Then, sitting atop these factions sat two layers of government: a Jewish ruler under Roman imperial control. Opinions at every level differed about religion and autonomy and taxes, and political disputes often meant brutality and bloodshed.

God’s people, Ironside wrote, were “harassed and distressed.” But as we know, seeing all of this pain and suffering, cruelty and brutality, Jesus did come — to save us.

Jesus was determined to accomplish his rescue mission, but he couldn’t have been afraid about the final outcome. As I recently wrote, he knew how everything would end. He knew he had nothing to fear, ultimately. So, even in the face of a colossal and complex crisis, my heart tells me Willard was right: Jesus must have been relaxed.

And if Jesus was relaxed then, we should be, too, now. Period.

I mean, he even told us so directly, repeating “do not fear” and “do not be afraid” and other variants several times in Scripture. Furthermore, if there’s a dominant message from Jesus regarding worry that underpins the entirety of the Gospels, it’s this: I’ve got this. Trust me. Relax.

Now, let’s get back to David French and the question of where we might be going. Surprisingly, given our recent track record, I think we might actually be moving together in that direction. Against seemingly long odds, we might actually be loosening our clenched fists. We might actually be shifting our collective mindset toward relaxation.

“I wonder,” French mused about this country, “if we’re leaving the era of the nasty snarl in favor of the broad smile.”

French makes his case for this shift by offering two possible leading indicators — and stats to support both. The first is “the spirit of joy that surrounded the Olympics.”

I don’t want to make too much of two weeks of Simone Biles’s greatness, Steph Curry’s shotmaking or Katie Ledecky’s dominance, but I felt a spirit of fun and exuberance around the Games that was qualitatively different from what we experienced in Tokyo in 2021 or Rio in 2016. Ratings were up 82 percent from the Tokyo Games, and Americans were neglecting work to watch the events.

Next, he discusses data showing that traffic to websites offering political news and commentary, which exploded before during and after the last two presidential elections, is dramatically down. This year is a presidential election year, too — a big one featuring plenty of populist rabble-rousing — but alas, “public interest in the news just isn’t the same,” wrote French. “It’s not even close.”

Maybe we’re simply exhausted. Maybe we’re tired of being afraid. Maybe all the counter-Biblical fear-mongering by our leaders on social, traditional and political media has just worn us out. Maybe because we were all created by a loving Father God, we can take only so much fear and dualistic thinking and cruelty before our souls just have to open to hope and dreaming and believing in goodness once again.

My heart tells me French is right, too.

“Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.” (1 Thessalonians 5:20-22, ESV)

Will you join me in beginning to once again trust Jesus more than any other person?

Justin Camp is the editor-in-chief of Rapt Interviews. He also created the WiRE for Men devotional and wrote the WiRE Series for Men. His writing has also been featured and seen on Charisma, Moody Radio, Focus on the Family, GOD TV, The Christian Post, Crosswalk, Belief.net, LifeWay Men and other media outlets.

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