The provocative blogger Matt Walsh got this email …

I often feel exactly as you do, and perhaps that makes me qualified to answer your questions, or perhaps it makes me especially unqualified to answer them. I suspect the latter. We have this bizarre idea in our society that we can only give advice to someone who is struggling as long as we are also in the throes of that same struggle. I think the opposite is often true. After all, when we are drowning we should wish for a lifeguard to save us, not for someone else to come along and drown beside us. …
You asked some very penetrating questions, and the only one I can answer with certainty is this: “Have you ever felt the same way?”

Answer: yes, often.

Your other questions, though, are a little tougher to handle. How can I trust God? How can I stop living in fear?

Now, I can say confidently that the first step in defeating fear and trusting God is prayer. I know that sounds like the cop out answer, and it is to a certain extent, because it’s really easy to say. It’s the Christian equivalent to the encouragement a teenager is given after he breaks up with his girlfriend — “there are other fish in the sea.” Both are offered reflexively, and often not for sincerity but for lack of anything more profound to say.

Yet, in the end, both are also true. There are plenty of other girls in the world and the kid will get over his heartbreak and meet someone else, just as prayer is the best way to trust God and fight fear. Our battle plan is futile if it does not include vigorous and frequent prayer. I know this for sure. …

Beyond that, all I can say is that maybe you and I should begin by asking not how we can trust God, but what we should trust God about. And not how can we stop living in fear, but what are we afraid of, specifically?

Yes, we should trust God about everything, but “everything” doesn’t quite clarify the matter.

So let me tell you the thought that comforts and motivates me, and I think it addresses both the trust and the fear:

I must trust God that He put us here, in this place, in this country, at this time for a reason.

Sometimes, in my weaker moments, I’m tempted to look at all of the things you listed — the hatred, the death, the evil, the lies, the ignorance — and think that God drew up the blueprints for the human race back before the beginning of time, evenly distributed a healthy dose of just, virtuous, and righteous souls throughout every period of history, and then got to our civilization and realized that He did His math wrong and used up all of the good and intelligent people on the previous eras. Then He didn’t feel like going back and reworking everything so He just figured that He’d pack all of the weak, selfish, imbeciles into our spot on the timeline.

You know, it’s sort of like when you have a big bag of mixed nuts and you eat all of the good stuff — walnuts, almonds, cashews — in the first couple of days, until there’s nothing but peanuts left.

We are the cosmic equivalent of a picked-over bag of nuts. We are the peanuts. Or, in another snack analogy, the purple Jolly Ranchers. The rejects.

At least, that’s what I think when I’m feeling especially sorry for myself.

However, the truth couldn’t be further from this.

The truth is that God knew what challenges we would face before we faced them. He knew where our society would be before we were born into it. He knew of the despair, violence, and misery before we felt it.

He knew that our time would call for warriors, and so He sent us.

He sent us — you and me and everyone. He sent us here, now, today, because we have work to do. We have a mission to complete, a purpose to fulfill.

I know you wish you were like those people who don’t seem to care or notice while the whole world burns around them — sometimes I desire the same for myself — but we can’t wish for coma when we are so awake. We can’t wish for blindness when we can see. These oblivious people need our help, and our first job now is to grab them by the shoulders and shake them until they open their eyes.

I think this is the answer to our fear as well. We can only be afraid of this world if we think we were born into it by accident; if we look at the challenges of our vocation like a man who forged his resume in order to get a job as a heart surgeon, and is now staring at an open chest cavity without the slightest notion of how to discern a left ventricle from a pulmonary vein (those are both in the heart, I think, or maybe they’re parts of a car engine).

The point is that we belong here. God selected us back before the Earth, the Sun, the stars, before everything, and earmarked us for this time, this reality, this battle. …

Only Jesus can save, of course, but He has delegated an enormous amount of power and responsibility to us. We have the capacity to spread truth and bring souls to Him. We are armed with abilities beyond our comprehension, and our actions, our words, or thoughts, will reverberate through the cosmos in ways that we cannot possibly understand. A distant star in a remote galaxy could explode tomorrow, destroy a hundred planets and alter the fate of a thousand solar systems, and still that would not be as significant or devastating as one sinful choice that we make.

But, on the same token, a star could form and burn so bright that it brings daylight to a hundred planets and sends a beam of light across 400 trillion miles of emptiness right into our eyeballs here on Earth, and still that would not be as beautiful, impactful, and illuminating as one virtuous or righteous choice of ours.

I think that fear always stems from hopelessness. But what reason do we have to be hopeless when we were made to serve such a magnificent purpose, and designed to live finally, once our time is done here, in the Promised Land?

I know you question whether you ought to bring children into this world, but I hope that doesn’t stop you. This culture wants us to become so beaten and broken that we abandon the loving, sacrificial, and procreative facets of our humanity. Don’t let them do that to you. Have kids and raise them with hope and equip them with the armor of truth. They will suffer, just as you have, but they will also live, and love, and win many battles for Christ.

Sometimes I look at my own kids and with dread I think to myself, “you have no idea what this world will do to you.” But then I realize that I should be looking at the world and with joy saying to it, “you have no idea what my children will do for you.”