How are Climate Activists feeling these days? Do you remember the climate as a political issue? Everyone seems to have stopped talking about the fate of our poor old planet for a year or so, and I think maybe Climate Activists are not OK…
Here’s a headline from iPolitics that was published on July 2, 2025: ‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost.
That is a jarring headline, all the more so if you fondly remember David Suzuki from his days as host of the documentary series The Nature of Things that the CBC ran from 1960 to 1979. Back then he was more of a friendly, smiley, nerdy, science guy. He’s long since turned his smile upside down into a scolding frown, and exchanged his helpful tips to be more environmentally conscious for dark profanity-laced prophecies of impending doom. In fact, I should probably have put a language warning on that link, Suzuki has developed a penchant for punctuating his alarmisms with F-bombs for impact.
But I don’t fault him for his increased anxiety. How else could anyone expect him to react to his deeply held belief that the world is about to end? He is not the one responding illogically, it’s the rest of the world that has spent the last decade or more pushing for Earth saving initiatives only to abandon them without having even made a dent in the goals they set out to accomplish, they’re the ones who are altogether too aloof about the whole climate situation. Why are they not joining in with earnest Australian eco-rock band Midnight Oil’s 1987 desperate cri de cœur, how can we sleep while our beds are burning?
It’s a fair question1, sleep and anxiety don’t mix. Sleep is elusive. I was reflecting on that as I was meditating on Psalm 3, and marveling at King David’s ability to sleep while assailed by his son’s army. David starts in verse 1 by lamenting “O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me;” and by verse 5 he says “I lay down and slept.”
As someone who now considers anyone’s claim of having enjoyed a good night’s sleep an intolerable brag, I found this Psalm remarkable.
How?! David’s on the run, in the wilderness, enemies surround him, trying to kill him, he finds some clump of moss to lay his head on and lights out… he gets his beauty sleep? Come on! There is only one way for this to happen, it has to be a literal miracle. I mean that God has to intervene and grant him this rest. David sleeps because although his circumstances would be anxiety-inducing to the most level-headed person in the world, he knows God is in control and so there is no reason to be anxious at all.
Sure, his own son has raised an army to overthrow and likely assassinate him, sure he is surrounded and assailed, sure this is all because of his own doing, he has created a mess he cannot possibly see a way out of. But… as David declares in verse 3, “the Lord is my shield.” End of story, good night, sleep tight.
As the literary great Victor Hugo wrote to Savinien Lapointe in 1841: “Take heart and be patient, sir. Heart for the great pains of life, and patience for the lesser ones. Then, when you have laboriously accomplished your daily work, go to sleep in all serenity. God is awake.”
We too can take comfort in God’s sovereignty when we are assailed by anxiety, and like David say to ourselves: Look, I know, I can’t get myself out of this mess, in fact I know I brought this on myself, so in all likelihood I would just make it worse, I know I don’t see a way, but I’m not the one in control, God is!
When you are lying there in the dark with your eyes wide open and sleep is completely beyond your grasp, and the enemy is whispering in your ear that it’s all your fault, that you made the mess and that you cannot fix it, and that no one can help you and that the situation is hopeless… what do you do?
Log onto facebook? Start scrolling? Turn the tv on? Take a pill? Start drinking…
What did David do? King David, not David Suzuki, David Suzuki railed about Green House Emissions then left on his private seaplane…
But King David? He looked that lie in the face and he confronted it with the truth. In fact, he turned that truth into a song and he sang himself to sleep. Well played King David, that to me is way more impressive than fighting a dozen giants!
Are you able to sing yourself to sleep with God’s truths?
You need to know the truth and to let the truth wash over you. So live in the Bible so that the beauty of its truth seeps into you. You should steep in the Bible like a soggy tea bag and let it saturate you until it oozes out of you. Then when the lie dares rear its ugly head, the truth makes no room for it, even when you are dog tired, especially when you are dog tired and you can’t even think straight, the truth is saturating every fibre of your being. Then you will know what it means that the truth will set you free.
But, do not fool yourself, this will not happen naturally all by itself. Whether you like it or not, whether you realize it or not, you are being catechized all day every day by the world. If you do not intentionally spend time reading the Bible, meditating, chewing on Biblical truth, you have no chance of standing up to the lies of the world, they will consume you.
A vague notion of Jesus loves me is not nearly sufficient, the world will happily take that and twist it like a pretzel into Jesus loves my sin. I mean look around you at how many fall prey to this easy slight of hand.
Read your Bible, delight in God’s word and the truth of God will be right there, over you, like a shield, like a blanket under which you are sound asleep resting in the knowledge that God is awake.
Sleep like David. Then awaken knowing that the Lord sustained you, knowing you have no reason to fear many thousands of climate activists who prophecy impending doom. Why?
Because you know something they do not: God is in control.
I am aware that what the earnest Australian 80’s eco-rock band Midnight Oil’s 1987desperate cri de cœur was decrying was not climate change inaction, but the colonial mistreatment of the Australian Aboriginal people.
The proper interpretation of their metaphorical question is that like Abel’s blood crying out from the ground declaring the injustice of Cain’s murderous actions, so the red hot systemic abuse of Australia’s aboriginal people caused the band’s beds to burst into flames in an indictment of the unresolved colonial past. How could Australians sleep when such an injustice stood unrectified?