Worried About the Future, Anchored in Hope

What am I most worried about for the future?

At the moment, it’s the rise of autocratic leaders in various parts of the world. That’s what keeps pressing on my mind. The ease with which power consolidates around a single figure. The dismantling of institutions that were meant to outlast any one person. The echo chambers, the purges, the silencing of dissent.

It’s not new. History has always had its strongmen—loud, self-assured, brimming with promises they have no intention of keeping. And history has a way of dealing with them. They get voted out, forced out, undone by their own overreach. But in the present moment, when you can see the destruction being wrought and the fear being cultivated, that long view is hard to hold. What frightens me is not just the leaders, but the people their power is producing.

There is the fear of war—of it creeping closer while we busy ourselves with other things. The twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history, and most of the lives lost weren’t even in combat but at the hands of governments turning on their own people. Will the twenty-first century be different? I want to say yes, but I suspect not.

Then there’s the housing crisis. I look at young people—smart, hard-working, highly educated—and I see how many of them are priced out of the cities they grew up in. There was once a pattern: study, work hard, save, buy a modest home. That’s not the pattern anymore. The rules have changed, but no one rewrote the expectations. People are doing everything right and still falling behind.

And of course, I worry about climate change. Not just the science or the forecasts, but the apathy. We’ve seen how quickly people can rally in a crisis. The Cold War. The Global Financial Crisis. When the threat is clear and immediate, we respond. But this threat advances slowly, unevenly. Some people won’t feel its bite in their lifetime. Others already are. Meanwhile, entire species are vanishing, weather events grow more severe, and we keep hitting snooze on the alarm.

All these concerns feel different on the surface, but I suspect they’re connected by something deeper: human greed. Our relentless drive for more—more power, more wealth, more convenience. We consume the world as if it’s ours to hoard.

There’s nothing new about that. The ancient writer of Ecclesiastes observed the same patterns: people chasing meaning in money, pleasure, status. He tried it all. And in the end, he called it meaningless. His final word? “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.”

That doesn’t remove my fears, but it puts them in context. It reminds me that history is not out of control, and neither is the future. That while human greed is powerful, God has not abandoned the world. And in the face of injustice, indifference, and decay, God’s promises still hold.

That, I think, is how fear becomes manageable—not by pretending the future is fine, but by knowing that someone greater still holds it.