Fear is a clever adversary.

When we think of fear, the first things that come to mind are old, decrepit Victorian mansions or abandoned houses fueled by stories of stories of swinging chandeliers or doors that creak open on their own.

Or we might think of less dramatic fears: heights or flying or small spaces.

Unless you’re suffering from one of these or other phobias—or ghosts—it is rather easy to simply discard fear as something other people experience.

But fear is not so simple.

Most often, it sneaks into mind and festers and builds like a bacteria that, if untreated, to infection, sepsis, and even death.

You can try preventative measures to keep it at bay, but bacteria can still get in. And you never know until you’re infected until the symptoms appear.

This is the primary modus operandi of fear.
It sneaks in, debilitates, and even paralyzes.
Ultimately, it renders its victim completely helpless.

This came to light during an unrelated discussion with my wife.

We have been trying to put the finishing touches on my next manuscript, which frankly has been simmering on the backburner over the last several due to life distractions. Currently, it is coming down to fact-checking and formatting endnotes.
It is especially nerve-racking because, unlike my previous book, we chose to self-publish this one. We have to get it right. It is all on us.

It’s been difficult to release the manuscript. We’re haunted by the questions: is there more that can be done? Is the subject even all that relevant anymore? What am I missing?

We check and recheck every detail.

We don’t want to let go and send it into a very cruel world.

We both recognized this paralysis after hearing ourselves begin everything with the phrase: “I’m afraid…”

This realization suddenly made this year make sense.

I have felt a bit off most of the year. I have become more subdued, resigned, troubled. I thought I was hiding it okay until a former (and very discerning) student came up to me recently and asked, “Mr. H., are you sad?”

That simple, innocent question shook me into an awareness. I don’t necessarily think I am depressed, but something is not right.

Since then, between that question and this recent epiphany with my wife, I realized that fear has crept into my life and is now controlling my psyche.

The first part of 2026 has been difficult. Now, I won’t pretend that it was somehow more difficult than others. But it has been tough. The remainder of 2026 has been trying to recover from it.

Last March, within days of the door slamming shut on my wife’s 25-year career, I lost my mom. In a way, I lost her over the last several years as she sank into dementia, but last March her battle ended.

Add this to standard stresses associated with a second semester in a high school, which in and of itself is enough to deplete my tanks. Now I have to tap into mental and emotional resources that don’t exist.

Fast forward to the present and I can see how God was with us in the storm. He gave me mental and emotionally resources, I never knew existed. He took care of us despite a huge income drop and being uninsured for a couple of month. Further, I know that my mom is now thinking more clearly than I could ever dream.

God gets the glory.

However, the enemy used a different tactic to paralyze me. Out of these hardship, fear crept in. And now I realize I am infected with it.
Watching my mom sink into the darkness of dementia, I have become afraid that one day I might suffer from that myself. I am afraid of losing my mind.

Unfortunately, once fear has a foothold, it doesn’t stop there. Fear escalated from fearing dementia to fearing getting old in general.

I am only a few months away from leaving behind my fifties forever. I began to fear getting old.
I fear my body slowing down. Simple things become a little harder. My back, my knees, and feet start to hurt a little more. I have a little more trouble hearing someone in a noisy room. I am doing that weird thing with my glasses when transitioning between reading close up and at a distance. It takes longer to get over a cold. Last July, I turned an ankle in Colorado that still aches today. The thought of not driving because driving in the winter or at night just isn’t worth the risk. I don’t want to give up the things that require the energy I had when I was young. How many summer road trips do I have left? What happens when I can no longer match the energy of a classroom of high school students?

Fear takes that into a whole new direction. I really don’t want to stop teaching. I love the classroom. I love the cycle of the school calendar. But what happens when my body can’t keep up? Can my filters remain strong enough to keep me from saying something mean or stupid? Will I become tiresome, or in the way? Can I keep my teaching style and not turn into a grumpy old stooge? Worse yet, what happens when I become irrelevant?

I have found myself somewhat paralyzed by this fear.

And it has dragged me down.

It has made me “look sad.”

All of this came together with the recent discussion with my wife.

Fear has overtaken me. It has taken control of me.

But is it too late?

Thankfully, no.

The most used phrase in the entirety of scripture is: “do not be afraid.”

However, one important observation that seems to be overlooked is that that phrase is almost always spoken from the supernatural point of view: God to human, Jesus to human, heavenly messenger to human.

From a broader, heavenly perspective to a limited, natural one.

“Do not be afraid.”

I have thought about this constantly since that epiphany I had with my wife.

I should not—must not—live in fear. Not as a child of the King.

But how do you switch fear off? It is not as simple as a light switch.

Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 10:5: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

The enemy’s game plan is to always whisper thoughts into our head that will trigger fear.

We have to be on guard always. When we get the sense of fear, we must be deliberate and take that thought captive and replace it with truth: “My God is bigger”; “He is my protector and comforter”; “This thought is not coming from him”.

Fear does not sit on the throne, God does. Fear, by definition, is limited, God is infinite. Fear is merely a tool, God is the creator of everything, including us who are made in gis image. Only God can break through the paralysis fear brings and can heal us.

Does that mean those things I fear will never happen? No. They likely will. But however the upcoming years pan out, he is with you, with me.

And whatever the future brings, God is God. And he is good.

History is more than memorizing dates and names.

History tells a story.

America has a unique story.

It's not one of perfection. Nor one that is error-free. The American story filled with both good and not-so-good chapters, moments which brings both pride and shame.

Some focus solely on the good. Others solely on the bad. However, focusing on one extreme or the other doesn't tell the whole narrative.

But American history is still our story. It defines us and gives our culture meaning.

I have walked through the town of Yorktown. I experienced Monticello as well as Jefferson's slave quarters.

I have stood at both headwaters of the Missouri River as well as its mouth into the Mississippi over 2000 miles later, marking the rough boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase that was marked by Lewis and Clark.

I have experienced the battlefields of Gettysburg and Vicksburg which marked the turning points of the Civil War, and Appomattix where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant.

I stood atop the hill upon which General Custer paid the final consequences for his careless judgments as well upon the field along the Wounded Knee Creek.

I have visited beaches of Utah and bloody Omaha, as well as walked among the bomb craters and bunker remains atop Pont du Hoc in Normandy, France.

They tell the stories of grave errors often found in a broken humanity, but also of divine miracles and grace as this nation stumbled its way through history like a lanky adolescent which formed and defined our unique culture that has been recently rediscovered and celebrated by European and Asian World Cup soccer fans.

This is the American story.

A story based on the idea that our basic rights come from our Creator, not from government. These rights are absolute, and they cannot be taken away.

It is an experiment that started 250 years ago today and endured hardships and countless close calls that could have changed the course of human history.

But we have persevered.

My prayer is we don't give up on this great experiment. America, I pray, has much more to show the world in the centuries to come.

Happy 250th birthday, USA!

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

I have been called stupid more times than I can even count.

I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree, and I am 60 minutes short of a post-graduate degree. Still, I have been called stupid by individuals with just a bachelor’s degree and others with Ph.D.’s, and even by some with no degree at all.

Usually, it is because of my political opinions or my identity as a follower of Jesus. For those antagonistic to my personal views and who know my story, my stupidity is simply evidenced by those final 60 minutes of my postgraduate program (Note, even though my supervisors said my thesis was ready to go, it was rejected by my examiners. This served as the inspiration for my book “Losers Like Us.)

Because of those disastrous 60 minutes in England, I have been hesitant to engage in anything controversial because of that one measly hour. In the back of my mind, I brace myself for that particular insult.

However, even when nothing is said, the dread of those 60 minutes has haunted me since 2008—17 years ago.

Still, sometime during those years, society has changed in ways that helped me better appreciate and be thankful that it worked out that way.

Something has evolved in our society in the last five years or so that has actually broadened my perception. I was hoping to teach at a university years ago. I wanted to be the “expert” in my field whatever that was. I wanted my ideas to be in demand.

But that is not all it’s cracked up to be. Since COVID, the idea of expertise has had its mask ripped off its face. As much as they don’t want to admit it, experts are realizing that we think they’re just as stupid as we are. Sure, they have more letters after their name and can throw around big words when diminutive words would do. But the one thing missing in most ivory towers is common sense.

The last movie the late great Gene Hackman was in was a little-known comedy called “Welcome to Mooseport.” Hackman played a retired U.S. president who settles in the small town to build his presidential library and enjoy the pleasures of retirement. However, the town needed a mayor and approached him to run for the office.

After all, who wouldn’t want a former president as mayor of the town?

After he agreed to run, a dude who ran the local hardware store, played by Ray Romano, threw his hat into the ring.

On one side there is the former president, an expert in his field of running the United States, overshooting the runway on every issue, promising to organize a blue-ribbon panel to study the issue of a high number of car accidents at a particular intersection. On the other hand, there is a local yokel suggesting a tree should be pruned back a little so traffic could better see the stop sign.

Thus, the current state of the “expert.”

In March 2021, after the COVID lockdown, the magazine The Atlantic published a piece called “Following your gut isn’t the right way to go.”

It was the subtitle that got my attention: “The experts had a rough year. We still have to trust them. “

The experts haven’t done anything to redeem themselves. This week, I saw a video of a congressional hearing in which a Senator asked an expert if men could get pregnant. The expert, a “medical doctor” promptly replied yes. When the Senator challenged her on this, she responded with “I am the expert here.”

Now, I realize that I only got a C in high school Health class, but I can totally understand from that is that experts have a ways to go before I or anyone else take any advice from them.

Although I know it won’t happen, we should probably retire the idea that someone is stupid because we don’t agree with them politically, metaphysically, or theologically.

Like every other term that is overused, “stupid” no longer has the same impact it’s had since, I don’t know, the third grade.

Nowadays, if someone calls me stupid, whether it’s in the media, on a social media post, or to my face, I just ignore them. It’s far easier to do once you realize that personal insults thrown your way are simply evidence the “other side” has no response to your argument.

Still, the truth is I am stupid.

I’ll own it.

We all are.

Even the ones who lack the self-awareness to admit it.

But this is where it gets good.

When my postgraduate studies went up in flames, I locked on to 1 Corinthians 1:27-29. It has been my life verse for well over a decade:

“But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”

If you’re a Christ-follower and someone calls you stupid—as they will—own it.

God has this extraordinary methodology through history to use us losers—stupid people by the world’s eyes—to do great things.

Without Jesus, one’s stupidity will do nothing more than just be stupidity.

On my office wall hangs a vivid photograph entitled, “Phares dans la Tempete, La Jument.” It shows a lighthouse keeper at La Jument reef, standing in the door of his lighthouse just as a towering wave nearly engulfs the structure from behind.

On December 21, 1989, a powerful storm smashed into the area, hitting the lighthouse with gale force winds and with waves reaching up to 30 meters (nearly 100 feet) high. During the night, the massive waves crashed through the lighthouse’s lower windows, flooding its living quarters and forcing the keeper to escape to the lantern room at the top of the lighthouse.

The next morning, despite dangerous flying conditions, a photographer named Jean Guichard hired a helicopter so he could photograph the dramatic storm from the air. The lighthouse keeper, Théodore Malgorn, heard the approaching helicopter and thought it was his rescuers. So he opened the door and stepped outside.

That was the moment the giant wave slammed into the lighthouse.

That was the moment Guichard took the shot.

Fortunately, the keeper was able to slip inside and shut the door, just before it was completely covered.

This famous picture of safety in the storm was given to me by my wife, shortly after life swept me into chaos. As I endured the greatest turmoil of my life, I took solace in looking at it, wondering what the lighthouse keeper felt that night. Did he shake with fear as the wind and waves whipped into a deadly frenzy, crashing again and again into his tiny stone tower?

Did his heart pound in his chest as freezing water shattered his windows and poured into his home? Did he pray to God for survival as he fled to the lantern room—the very last refuge he had?

That night in the lighthouse, the keeper must have felt very unsure of his own safety. Yet in the whole vast ocean, the lighthouse was the safest place of all.

Like the lighthouse keeper, Jesus once faced a violent storm. After a day of ministry beside the Sea of Galilee, he and his disciples set out by boat to cross to the other side. But according to Mark 4:37-38:

“A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, ‘Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?’”

Note the sequence of the disciples’ reactions. Like most of us, first they panic; only later do they ask the God of the universe for help.

But Jesus does not punish them for this lapse by withholding that help; instead he immediately commands the elements to “Be still!”—and they obey. Only then does he turn to his disciples and ask, “’Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?’” (v. 39-40).

The truth is, it is one thing to trust God when things go well. But it is another to trust him from the center of the storm, when our world is upended.

And our world is upended now.

It is a dumpster fire.

When life is like this, we must take refuge in our Creator, who is far bigger than anything a broken world can throw at us.
No matter what happens—even if we experience sickness or death—we are not spiraling helplessly through stormy seas. Instead, we are secure in our lighthouse as the storm rages around us.

We are safe in the arms of Christ.