Before you doom-scroll
If you’ve opened your phone this morning, you’ve probably already seen them. The hot takes. The all-caps posts. Pastors and Christians announcing that this is it, the beginning of the end.
I get it. Elections stir up real emotion, and they matter. But before you spiral, I want to offer a different take.
The sky is not falling.
Not because nothing is at stake. Because of Who is still in charge. And because Scripture shows a pattern we tend to forget: some of God’s greatest renewals came in the middle of His people’s greatest trials.
When the church got scattered
Rewind to Acts 8. Stephen has just been killed for preaching Jesus, and a great persecution breaks out against the church in Jerusalem. Almost everyone except the apostles has to run, scattering across Judea and Samaria.
Picture that. Homes, jobs, friends, your whole church community gone basically overnight. If anyone had a right to post “the sky is falling,” it was them.
But look at what Luke tells us next: “Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went” (Acts 8:4, NIV).
They didn’t stop at survival. They turned their displacement into a mission trip. Philip went down to Samaria, preached Christ, and the city was filled with joy. A few chapters later, some of those same scattered believers made it all the way to Antioch. A great number of people turned to the Lord there, and it was in Antioch that followers of Jesus were first called Christians (Acts 11:19–26).
The very thing meant to stamp out the church is what God used to spread it. The trial wasn’t the end of the story. It was the launch.
Our real problem might be comfort
Here’s my honest read. For as long as I’ve been alive, there has been a spirit of apathy in the American church.
Yes, there are pockets of revival. There are churches that are genuinely on fire, and I thank God for them. But overall, it has been easy to be a Christian in America for a long time. And easy has led to spiritual obesity.
We take in a lot. Podcasts, worship playlists, sermons at 2x speed, devotionals on our phones. But we rarely burn any of it off by actually living it out, serving people, or telling anyone about Jesus. We’re well fed and out of shape.
Comfort almost never makes us hungry for God. Hard seasons usually do.
So who knows?
God may be doing more today to wake up His church than we could ever imagine.
I’m not saying hard times are good in themselves. I’m saying God doesn’t waste them. He has a long track record of taking what looks like a setback and turning it into the setup for something only He could do.
I pray it would be so.
And here’s the good news: you don’t need the perfect take on today’s headlines. You just need to do what those scattered believers did. Tell somebody about Jesus. The coworker who’s anxious this morning. The friend who’s done with church but not done with God. The neighbor you’ve been meaning to talk to for months.
The sky is not falling. God is still on His throne.
Go tell somebody about Him today.
