What makes you nervous?
What makes me nervous is the old human hunger for power, now armed with new tools. We are living in a time when authoritarian rulers reach for glory without regard for the human cost. Sometimes they collude. Sometimes they turn on one another. Either way, ordinary people are crushed beneath their ambition.
The weapons are more powerful now, the consequences more far-reaching, and the stakes feel frighteningly high. Without faith, I think I would be overwhelmed by it all. But faith reminds me that tyranny is not new. History has seen leaders drunk on their own greatness before. And history has also seen that they are not supreme, no matter how loudly they boast. What steadies me is the knowledge that tyranny is not new, and neither is God’s response to it.
Reading through Isaiah last year was a great help. Here ‘s a reflection I wrote at the time based on Isaiah 10:
We fear what looms largest.
We fear the empire’s shadow
more than the light
that casts it.
Yet there is a remnant—
a smaller hope,
quiet as a sapling
pushing up through shattered pavement.
They lean, not on muscle,
not on marching alliances,
but on the Lord,
whose calm cuts deeper than any chaos.
It is better to stand still in faith
than to run in fear toward destruction.
Better to be the remnant,
broken and blessed,
than the axe, proud and passing.
For in the end,
even the axe
must answer
to the hand
that holds it.
The Afterword 
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