That’s Not Fear, That’s Clarity
There’s a crocodile in the room.
And someone I love keeps insisting on calling it a puppy.
“It’s not a crocodile,” they say. “You’re living in fear. You’re catastrophizing. You’re letting anxiety consume you.”
But here’s the thing: I can see the teeth. I can see the teeth. I know what a crocodile looks like because I’ve studied it. I’ve read about it. I’ve watched what happens when people ignore crocodiles.
The crocodile isn’t my imagination. The crocodile is real.
What’s really happening is this: I’m naming what I see. And that clarity is being mistaken for fear.
But they’re not the same thing. This is the difference between fear vs anger—between paralysis and action.
Fear paralyzes. Fear makes you freeze. Fear keeps you small and quiet and hoping that if you’re very still, maybe the danger will go away.
Anger grounded in clarity? That makes you move. It sharpens your mind. It says: there is a crocodile in this room, and I need to figure out how to keep myself and the people I love safe.
That’s not fear. That’s wisdom.
When Fear Kept Me Trapped
I spent twenty years in my first marriage—a relationship that was slowly dismantling me.
I knew it from the beginning, actually. Not consciously—not at first. But there were small moments of wrongness. Things that didn’t add up. Patterns that should have alarmed me but instead I rationalized them. I spiritualized them. I prayed about them and waited for God to fix the person I’d married.
The fear was constant. Not the acute fear of a crocodile—the slow-moving, soul-deadening fear that comes from living with someone who is hurting you and being told that leaving would be a sin. That fear doesn’t make you run. It makes you smaller. It makes you question your own perceptions. It makes you wonder if you’re the one who’s broken.
Twenty years.
And then something shifted. Slowly at first, and then all at once, I got angry.
Not the kind of anger that’s reactive or defensive. The kind of anger that is clarity finally finding its voice. The kind of anger that says: This is not okay. This is not what love looks like. This is not what God would ask of me.
I didn’t leave because I became less afraid. I left because I got angry enough to act.
And here’s what I discovered: my anger wasn’t spiritual failure. It was spiritual awakening. It was the voice of God saying, Protect yourself. Protect your children. Get out.
The anger is what saved me.
The Crocodile in the Room Right Now
But this post isn’t really about my first marriage. It’s about what’s happening in our world right now, and how we’re being told to call crocodiles puppies.
There’s injustice in America. Real, documented, observable injustice. Policies being enacted. People being hurt. Systems that were already broken being broken further.
And when some of us say, “I see this. This is wrong. We need to address this,” we’re told that we’re living in fear. We’re anxious. We’re catastrophizing. We’re not trusting God.
But we’re not afraid. We’re awake.
Recently, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech at the World Economic Forum about the end of the old world order. And in it, he referenced Václav Havel’s essay about a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window every morning that says “Workers of the world, unite!”—even though he doesn’t believe it. He does it to signal compliance. To avoid trouble. To get along.
And Havel’s question was simple. How does the system persist? Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Carney said, “We are taking the sign out of the window.”
That’s what I’m talking about. That’s clarity. That’s refusing to participate in the pretense that everything is fine when it isn’t.
It’s not fearful to name what’s actually happening. It’s prophetic.
Fear vs Anger: Understanding the Difference
Look, the Bible is full of angry people. And most of them were the ones God listened to.
The prophets weren’t afraid. They saw what was wrong—injustice, corruption, the powerful preying on the vulnerable—and they spoke about it with heat and conviction. Jeremiah wept. Amos was furious. Jesus flipped tables in the temple because he saw people being exploited in God’s house.
This wasn’t spiritual immaturity. This was spiritual clarity.
When we talk about being angry at God, we sometimes miss the deeper permission we’re being given: you can be angry with God. You can be angry for the same reasons God is angry—because you see injustice and it breaks your heart.
Fear says: I’m terrified, so I’ll stay silent.
But anger grounded in truth? That says: I see what’s happening, and I cannot stay silent.
One paralyzes. The other mobilizes.
When Jesus encountered injustice, he didn’t pray for peace. He acted. He spoke. He challenged the systems that were harming people. And yes, that made him uncomfortable to be around. It cost him. But it was the most faithful thing he could do.
There’s a reason the prophets weren’t popular in their own time. Clarity never is. Truth-telling is always uncomfortable for people who benefit from the lie.
What It Costs to See Clearly
Here is the hard truth.
Sometimes clarity costs something. Sometimes naming the crocodile means acknowledging that you’re standing in the room with it. That you have stakes in what happens next. That speaking up might have consequences you can’t fully control.
That’s terrifying.
I won’t pretend otherwise. There are real costs to refusing to participate in the pretense. There are real vulnerabilities that come with speaking truth when you have people you love who depend on you.
And in those moments, the temptation to call the crocodile a puppy becomes almost overwhelming. It would be easier. It would be safer. It would be more comfortable. The psychological barriers to speaking up are real—fear of retaliation, social exclusion, the bystander effect that makes us assume someone else will act.
But here’s what I’ve learned from my failed marriage, from my faith, from watching what happens when good people stay silent. The alternative—pretending everything is fine so that everyone stays comfortable—that costs more.
It costs your integrity. It costs your children’s future. It costs the vulnerable people around you who need someone to say out loud what they already know but are too vulnerable to name.
There’s an illustration that makes this uncomfortably clear. If there are ten people sitting at a table sharing a meal, and one is a Nazi and the other nine are silent, then there are ten Nazis at that table.
Silent complicity is still complicity. And silence in the face of injustice isn’t peace. It’s betrayal.
Permission to Be Awake
So here’s what I want to say to you, especially if you’re someone who sees the crocodile and is being told you’re living in fear:
Your anger is not a sin. Your clarity is not anxiety. Your refusal to pretend is not spiritual immaturity.
You are awake. And the world needs people who are awake right now.
This doesn’t mean you react from a place of panic or despair. It doesn’t mean you live in a constant state of crisis. Clarity is calm. Clarity is focused. Clarity sees the threat and asks: What is mine to do about this?
And sometimes what’s yours to do is speak. Sometimes it’s act. Sometimes it’s pray. Sometimes it’s protect the people you love by being strategic about when and how you use your voice. Sometimes it’s simply refuse to call the crocodile a puppy, even when everyone around you is doing exactly that.
That takes courage. It takes faith. It takes the kind of spiritual maturity that comes from knowing your own heart and trusting that God is bigger than your fear.
The prophets knew this. The martyrs knew this. The ordinary people throughout history who chose truth over comfort—they knew this. They also knew when to speak and when to act in other ways. Wisdom isn’t just about having the courage to speak. It’s about having the discernment to know what this moment requires of you specifically.
Your anger at injustice is not evidence that fear is winning. It’s evidence that you’re paying attention. That you care. That you still believe—even when it’s hard—that things could be different and better. That you refuse to participate in the pretense that everything is fine.
And that, I think, is exactly what this moment requires.
Not everyone’s calling is to shout from the rooftops. Some of us are called to protect. Some to heal. Some to quietly resist in ways that won’t make headlines but will keep others safe while still refusing to comply with lies.
The question isn’t whether you’re angry about what you see. The question is – What are you going to do with that clarity?