In January 2025, I had a flight booked to Los Angeles, and I was keeping an eye on reports of wildfires threatening the city. Those reports only seemed to worsen as the days passed. Drought conditions, low humidity, and a buildup of vegetation, together with hurricane-force Santa Ana winds were whipping up more than a dozen fires across Southern California, especially in LA neighborhoods like Altadena and Pacific Palisades. When I flew in, most of the fires had been contained, but not before burning over 50,000 acres, destroying more than 16,000 buildings, forcing more than 180,000 people to evacuate, and most tragically, killing 30 people (some estimates suggest up to 440 deaths are attributable to the blaze).1
Los Angeles is a huge city. We often think of big cities being immune from such devastation. But no doubt you’ve seen photos and news footage of burned-out neighborhoods, scorched canyons, and the smoldering ruins of seaside homes. How could such carnage happen in a city like LA? When I put this question to one of my hosts, she replied, “It feels like the whole world is on fire right now.”
Finding Christian Hope in Difficult Times
And it did. In January alone of that year, there were mass killings in New Orleans, Montenegro, and Tehran. There was a constitutional crisis in South Korea, threatening the stability of North Asia. There were full-scale wars in Ukraine and Gaza and civil wars in Chad and Colombia. In the US, the second presidency of Donald Trump had just begun, with a wave of protests across the country. There was a mental health crisis among young people, and a burned-out workforce laboring in health care, education, ministry, and nonprofit service. There was crushing loneliness, mass incarceration, environmental destruction, and rising fascism, all of which find fuel in economic despair.
Sure, there are always wars and disasters threatening people somewhere in the world, but many people feel the 2020s have been particularly tumultuous.
How Christians Can Respond to Cultural Division
But on top of wars and natural disasters, like those destructive Santa Ana winds in LA, there are also hurricane-like cultural headwinds blowing in the opposite direction to the values of Jesus. So much of what the West has assumed to be good and proper behavior—truth telling, justice seeking, kindness, mercy, humility—is being overturned by those winds of change. This realization peaked for me recently when there was actually a cultural debate about whether empathy is a sin. This was set in motion by two interlocking cultural moments—the publishing of Joe Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy and Elon Musk’s much-quoted statement “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Empathy! Weakness? A sin? How did we get here?
Why Compassion and Mercy Still Matter
As perplexing as that debate was, it was symptomatic of a broader cultural malaise that views things like feeding the hungry, preaching about mercy, hiring women as pastors, and advocating for refugees as suspicious political activity. Of course, such a cultural shift doesn’t happen overnight. These are long-held views by many in society, but by the mid-2020s it had become apparently acceptable to voice these beliefs and (sadly) behave accordingly.
With the announcement in May 2025 that Bishop Robert Prevost would become the new pope came a barrage of criticism from people on the right of politics. He was denounced as “woke,” “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist.”2 All this because Prevost had advocated for stronger support for migrants, increased access to mental health care and stronger, sensible gun control laws, something Catholics have supported for decades. All of a sudden, though, it had become a negative thing for a papal candidate to advocate for mercy and compassion.
Maybe you’ve seen one of those Venn diagrams with the overlapping circles labeled with book titles like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, et cetera, with the main intersection announcing, “You are here!” It feels like that sometimes.
Responding to World Crises Without Losing Faith
How are we as Christians to respond to these headwinds? How do we deal with all the tragedy and tumult? We can’t simply ignore it, although I’ll confess to wanting to do so at times. Sometimes it feels like news broadcasts are too much to bear. Having said that, I was chastened by a New Yorker cartoon by Barbara Smaller recently, depicting a wife telling her husband, “You do realize that just because you stopped watching the news doesn’t mean it stopped happening.”3
Staying Informed Without Becoming Overwhelmed
I know withdrawal isn’t the answer (although you might want to ration the amount of mainstream and social media you consume). I can’t bury my head in the sand. Indeed, the temptation to do so is an indication of my privilege. I need to remain informed and attendant to the needs of the world because for many in our society these aren’t simply events to be observed but survived. This cultural moment has immediate bearing on the lives of women, immigrants, and people of color, who experience the rising tide of misogyny, xenophobia, and racism as a direct personal threat. The world is on fire, and some people are much closer to the flames than others.
The danger for me, though, is that I can find myself either becoming very angry about the horrors going on at the moment or, alternatively, I can slide into cynicism and apathy.
Choosing Hope Over Anger, Cynicism, and Apathy
The late Pope Francis once wrote,
Even though we do not know what tomorrow may hold for us, we should not look to the future with pessimism and resignation. Wars, social injustices, and the many forms of violence we are exposed to every day should not dishearten us nor draw us towards skepticism and discouragement.
We choose love and love makes our hearts fervent and hopeful. Those who love, even if they find themselves in uncertain situations, always view the world with a gentle gaze of hope.4
Finding Joy in Hope-Filled Christian Living
I desire that gentle gaze of hope. I don’t want to be infected by either anger or indifference. I mentioned this to one of my friends, who suggested I listen to the Resistance Revival Chorus’s album This Joy. The album is comprised of original songs and protest classics and is utterly uplifting. The seventy-person choir sings triumphantly about how much our world needs joy in resistance. And it really resonated with me. I think they’re right. We need to find joy in our response to a world sliding away from the values we Christians should hold dear.
Biblical Hope and Joyful Service in Colossians 1
I’ve always loved Paul’s impassioned pastoral prayer for the church at Colossae. It’s the one that begins, “Since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you” (Colossians 1:9). It’s such an exquisitely written prayer, in which he asks that God might fill his readers with knowledge and wisdom and understanding and endurance and patience so that they may devote themselves to “every good work . . . giving joyful thanks to the Father” (verses 9-12).
“Every good work” and “joyful thanks”—that’s the combination we should strive for. And it emerges from God’s gift of knowledge and wisdom. We are not to become political creatures in any craven, partisan fashion. We are to grow in the knowledge of God, which propels us into a broken world ready to serve the lost and the least and be filled with joyful gratitude.
- Britannica, “Los Angeles Wildfires of 2025,” by John P. Rafferty, updated April 17, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/event/Los-Angeles-wildfires-of-2025.
- Justin Baragona, “MAGA Melts Down Over ‘WOKE MARXIST POPE’ Who Is a ‘Never Trumper Liberal,’” The Independent, May 8, 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/maga-woke-american-pope-leo-xiv-b2747600.html.
- Barbara Smaller, Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, April 22, cartoon, The New Yorker, April 22, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/tuesday-april-22nd-avoiding-the-news.
- Pope Francis, quoted in Mattha Busby, “Don’t Give In to Pessimism Despite Wars and Injustice, Says Pope Francis,” The Guardian, December 28, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/28/dont-give-in-to-pessimism-says-pope-francis-in-bbc-thought-for-the-day.
Adapted from Field Notes from a World on Fire: Five Acts of Hope-Filled Resistance for Unsettled Times by Michael Frost. Copyright © 2027. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries.
