There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that believers are feeling right now. It’s not the kind of “tired” that comes from working too hard or sleeping too little. It’s something deeper – a soul-weariness that sets in when the gap between what is obviously true and what people are being asked to accept becomes so wide it almost feels like a joke… except it isn’t funny.
I’ve been watching; I’ve been paying attention and observing for years. Lately, I’ve been commenting on it, because silence starts to feel like complicity when the absurdity reaches a certain level. That is where I see us all now. We’ve reached that point.
When officials casually propose race-based tax policies with a straight face and call it progress; when self-appointed experts like Bill Gates, who is hailed a genius, suggest chopping down forests to capture carbon, apparently unaware that trees have been doing exactly that since the beginning of creation; when basic legal realities like citizenship requirements for voting become “it depends” territory; when a coordinated global pattern of open borders, uniform ideology, and demographic shift gets called a conspiracy theory the moment you notice it out loud… These aren’t political opinions. They’re straight up reality checks, and your gut knows the difference.
It shows up as a feeling within us. It’s that feeling you get when something doesn’t add up, when the stated facts and the observable evidence refuse to align, when you look at what’s being presented as progress or intelligence or compassion and something in you says no, that’s not right, and that feeling is not your problem. That feeling is your discernment working. That feeling is the ANSWER to the actual problem, which is the noise and nonsense itself.
Most people fall into a well-camouflaged trap, though. It’s a psychological trap, more than anything else. The absurdity of what’s happening is so extreme that people get stuck between two impossible choices. They can take it seriously, which pulls them into the spin cycle. Or they can dismiss it, which feels irresponsible and naive. So, they stay frozen in the middle, anxious and confused, mistaking constant engagement with chaos for being informed. Most ultimately resort to mistaking panic for paying attention.
This is what you need to understand: panic is not the same thing as awareness, and the noise is not the same thing as reality.
That might sound strange at first, and so might this: the people who feel most deeply that something is wrong are actually the ones closest to clarity – not because suffering is noble, but because the willingness to sit with that feeling, to follow the questions all the way down instead of numbing them or dismissing them, is exactly how truth finds you.
You cannot find God without first acknowledging that something is missing. You cannot find clarity without first admitting that what you’re being handed doesn’t make sense. The questions aren’t creating the chaos. The questions are the answer to it.
I know this because of what happened when I actually started reading the Bible. Not pulling verses out here and there, but reading it as what it actually is: a whole arc. A complete picture. The pieces don’t make sense in isolation, but when you put them together in the right way, in the right places, it becomes a picture you can’t unsee. And once you see it, the world starts to look completely different. Not less broken, but differently broken. Broken in ways that were anticipated. Broken in ways that were written down thousands of years ago and are unfolding exactly on schedule.
For example, consider these Scriptures:
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. (Matthew 24:6)
For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them. (1 Thessalonians 5:3)
Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived. (2 Timothy 3:13)
This is not doom. This is a map, and a map is only useful if you know where you are on it.
The clarity I’m describing didn’t arrive all at once. Sanctification takes time. But it did require one moment in which there was a full and complete surrender of my mind, my body, my reasoning, every part of my life to God. That’s when He started showing me things. That’s when the picture started coming into focus.
Here’s what I see now when I look at the world: Most of it cancels itself out. The noise, the outrage, the spin, the counter-spin, the manufactured urgency, the political theater, the coordinated chaos designed to make you feel like you’re always one news cycle away from catastrophe – it is all, at its root, nonsense. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the framing is designed to keep you small and reactive and afraid. To keep your eyes on the ground so you never look up. This is why Scripture is adamant that we understand that we are in the world, but not of it, and that we live accordingly.
Looking up is a spiritual act.
Alan Watts used to talk about this kind of wide-angle vision – the ability to hold all of existence loosely enough that you stop being destroyed by the parts you can’t control. He was onto something real, even if his theological framework was incomplete, because the peace he was describing, the kind that comes from genuinely seeing the big picture, has a name in Scripture.
And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:7)
That peace is not a feeling you manufacture. It’s not positive thinking or detachment or New Age philosophy or pretending things aren’t broken. It’s what happens when you have actually handed the outcome to God and genuinely believe he holds it. It’s incomprehensible to people who don’t have it, and that’s okay. It was always going to be that way.
These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)
He overcame it. Past tense. It’s done.
Knowing all of this doesn’t make you immune to getting lost in it. I know that from personal experience. There are seasons when the weight of everything, the grief, the fear, the isolation, the relentless noise, presses in at once and the peace that passes all understanding feels more like a theological concept than something you’re actually standing on. The map is real, but you can still lose your footing while reading it. That’s not a faith failure. That’s being human in a broken world.
The Psalmist David knew this too. He didn’t pretend his way out of it. He talked to himself:
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. (Psalm 42:11)
What jumps out at you about what he did there? What I hope you recognize is that he didn’t scramble around asking his friends or the philosophers or teachers of the day, or even the spiritual leaders, what he was feeling or dealing with, or how to cope. He asked himself the question. He followed it all the way down, and then he answered it with what he knew to be true, not what he felt in the moment.
That is the practice. Not positive thinking. Not denial. Not doomscrolling in the opposite direction. The answers you’re looking for are not out there in the noise. They never were. If you want to find the answers for your own life, and you want to know God, you first have to know yourself – and then build relationship with God. That’s the only way He can work in you, and help you to grow and evolve. You must know who you are/were without Him, in order to be able to embody the life that comes into existence with Him.
To walk in faith is not to have all the answers. Faith is precisely the opposite of having all the answers, and to live from faith is to finally have the peace you will never find in this world. But neither faith nor peace are as free as many spiritual teachers would have you believe. It’s the hard, honest work of returning to the foundation when the noise has pulled you under. It’s going back to who God is, what He has said, and what He has already done. It’s reminding yourself that your feelings about the current moment are real, but they are not the final word on the current moment.
And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9)
In due season. Not in our season, but His.
That’s the combat. Not a formula. Just the daily, sometimes hourly, choice to anchor yourself in what doesn’t move, even when everything around you is shaking.
None of this means we stop paying attention or stop speaking truth. It means we do both from a place of stability rather than panic. We notice the things and the patterns that don’t add up. We name them. We ask the questions. And then we remember that the outcome was never actually in the hands of the people who seem to be driving the chaos.
The world is loud right now. It is going to get louder. Scripture told us it would, and it was right about everything else. But underneath all of it, past the noise and the nonsense and the manufactured fear, there are important things that will never cancel out.
Soul doesn’t cancel out.
Truth doesn’t cancel out.
God doesn’t cancel out.
In the end, it’s all nonsense, except soul. And if you know that, really know it, you can breathe. You can think clearly. You can ask the hard questions without being destroyed by them. You can look at the chaos and say, “I see you, and I know how this ends.“
That’s not ignorance. That’s not conspiracy thinking. That’s not being unbothered because you’re naive.
That’s faith, and it’s the only thing in this world that actually holds.
Twin Tree Project 