When the world feels like it’s coming apart, the easiest response is to get loud: Outrage over the news or spreading fear across social media. Before long, faithfulness starts to look embarrassingly small compared with whatever fresh disaster is currently lighting up everyone’s feed.
Trillia Newbell has a different answer for Christians trying to live through an anxious age: Keep doing good.
“We need fighters but not the kind that burn down the nation,” the author and Bible teacher said. “We need people willing to keep doing good — who overthrow the culture with good.”
In other words, Newbell is encouraging Christians to not become passive observers while the world suffers. She’s calling for a form of resistance that doesn’t need rage to prove it’s serious. It’s the kind of resistance Jesus actually gave His followers: love your neighbor, including the one who makes that command feel wildly inconvenient.
“We need warriors willing to do good to their neighbors, as Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor,” she said.
For Newbell, endurance doesn’t require pretending everything is fine. The world has never been fine on this side of Eden, and the fractures running through families and churches are real. But Christians lose something important when they let the panic of the moment convince them panic is the most honest response.
“The world today does indeed look grim, but has there ever been a time when the world didn’t look grim after sin came in?” Newbell said.
The difference now is how much of the world’s grief we can see at once. A crisis across the globe reaches your phone before you’ve finished your coffee. A political fight becomes a test of personal righteousness before anyone has taken time to think. A church controversy becomes a referendum on the entire faith before anyone pauses long enough to pray.
Newbell’s point is simple and hard: Christians can’t build hope on the news cycle. Hope has to come from somewhere sturdier.
“There is reason for great hope,” she said. “It isn’t hope in you or me or our strength. Or in our ruling authorities. Or in our churches, pastors, or fellow congregants. No, we hope in the faithfulness and power of Christ.”
In Newbell’s framing, Christian hope can’t depend on whether culture feels stable or whether public life looks sane. The deepest Christian allegiance was never meant to collapse every time society disappoints us.
“God is not wringing His hands, hoping we get our political act together so things can be fixed,” she said. “God hasn’t given up His rule and authority.”
For anxious Christians, that may be the line worth taping to the bathroom mirror. God isn’t waiting for better polling data. He’s not pacing heaven, hoping humanity finally develops a strategy that can hold. The Christian story insists He remains sovereign even when the world looks ungovernable.
“You and I can resist anxiety and fear by remembering what is true about God,” Newbell said. “We have a different and better allegiance, and it isn’t to any ruler or authority on this earth.”
Newbell doesn’t turn faith into a shortcut around pain. Trusting God doesn’t mean Christians get a full explanation of what He’s doing in real time. Most of the time, faith looks quieter than that. It looks like obedience when the outcome is unclear. It looks like doing the next right thing when no one can guarantee it will work.
“We wait and trust,” she said. “God is always working, whether we recognize it or not. And one day our faith will become sight.”
To explain that kind of trust, Newbell tells a story about a young girl who got separated from her mother during an event Newbell hosted. The girl found Newbell in tears, convinced she was lost. Moments later, her mother appeared and pulled her close. She had been nearby the whole time; the child simply couldn’t see her.
“We can relate to this little girl,” Newbell said. “There are moments when the cares of our hearts, our sorrows and our burdens cause us to wonder where God is.”
Anyone who has tried to follow Jesus through grief or a brutal stretch of news knows the feeling. It’s the panic of being spiritually misplaced. It’s the fear that God is near to other people but somehow distant from you. It sends people looking for something visible enough to calm them, even when the presence they need most is already near.
Newbell points to Psalm 46, where God is called “our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
“This means God isn’t sort-of present, halfway present, distracted or distant,” she said. “He is always present. God is with us in our lostness and trouble.”
That presence matters because fear has a way of shrinking our spiritual imagination. A crisis can start to look bigger than God. Outrage can feel productive when it’s mostly draining the life out of us. Newbell argues Christians have to keep telling themselves the truth before anxiety gets the final word.
“If I’m worried and anxious, I may not be able to remember where my help comes from,” she said.
The call reaches straight into public pain. Christians are asked to love their neighbors with steady courage, to serve vulnerable people without turning compassion into a performance and to tell the truth without letting fear make them cruel. Goodness can feel painfully inefficient in a culture that rewards spectacle, but Newbell’s argument is that endurance has always been part of the Christian witness.
“In a society where voices are loud and it feels like chaos reigns, we need to find a refuge in the God who holds us,” she said.
That kind of faith won’t always look impressive. It may frustrate people who think every Christian response needs to come with a flamethrower. But a culture trained to confuse outrage with courage desperately needs people whose convictions don’t curdle into contempt.
Newbell’s challenge is straightforward: Don’t surrender your faithfulness just because the world feels unstable.
“Don’t grow weary in doing good, if indeed you are doing good,” Newbell said. “Don’t let fear cause you to grow faint. Don’t lose heart.”
