When You Can’t Stop Thinking About What Could Go Wrong

We are, collectively, living in a lot right now.

Which means many of us are also lying awake at 2:14 a.m., mentally walking through every possible version of the future—most of them not great.

On one hand, we just watched Artemis II do something incredible—human beings traveling farther than ever before, seeing things with their own eyes that no one has ever seen.

And at the exact same time… we’re also watching world events—and even things happening in our own country—that feel, for many of us, anxiety-provoking… and if we’re being honest, sometimes just plain scary.

It’s a strange combination: awe and anxiety. Wonder and worst-case scenarios.

Just last month, I was speaking to a group of F-22 spouses whose airmen had just deployed—many of them for the first time. The feeling in the room wasn’t excitement.

It was worry. It was quiet. The kind of quiet where everyone is doing risk calculations in their head… a skill we all wish we had never developed.

Which raises the question a lot of us are living with, whether we say it out loud or not:

How do you build a life—marriage, family, faith—when your mind keeps running ahead to everything that could go wrong?

Here’s the bottom line:

If we want to not just survive—but actually thrive in uncertain seasons—we have to learn how to live with hope, not fear.

Which sounds lovely and inspirational… until about 2:14 a.m. when your brain decides to run a full highlight reel of everything that could go wrong—commercial-free, no ability to skip.

Hope is not our default setting.
Fear is.

Hope is something we have to choose—repeatedly. Sometimes hourly.

Let me take you to a moment I couldn’t “positive think” my way through.

July 19, 2019.

I said goodbye to my husband… and then watched him climb into a capsule sitting on top of more rocket fuel than I was emotionally equipped to process as a person who prefers to keep her heart rate under 180.

Then I stood in a dusty field, in the dark, holding my kids’ hands… waiting for the countdown.

And I remember thinking:

“In about ten seconds… this will either be one of the best days of my life… or the worst.”

And I felt physically sick.

Not because I didn’t trust the training or the equipment—I did.
Not because I didn’t trust the crew or the support team—I absolutely did.

But here’s what we all know:

Trust does not eliminate risk.
Faith does not eliminate risk.

That’s the tension we live in.

I used to think fear was about the moment in front of me.

The launch. The deployment. The goodbye.

But it’s not.

It’s about what comes after.

Because even when everything goes right—when they come home safe, when the mission succeeds—things don’t just snap back into place like a rubber band.

Deployments and long separations change people.
They change marriages.
They change how you parent.

What we’re really facing is the fear of an unknown future.

And the Bible doesn’t pretend that’s not real. “Do not be afraid” shows up a lot—which would be a strange thing to repeat if there weren’t very real reasons to be afraid.

So the question isn’t:

“How do I eliminate fear from my life?”

The question is:

“What am I going to do with it?”

Because at the end of the day, we really only have two options:

We can let fear lead—which is our human default—
or we can face it with hope.

And hope—real hope—is not optimism.

It’s not pretending everything will be fine, because sometimes it won’t be.
It’s not that one friend who says, “Everything happens for a reason,”—while you quietly reconsider the friendship.

Hope is sturdier than that.

Hope says:

Even if things don’t go the way I want…
Even if this becomes one of the worst days of my life…
I will not be alone in it.

I have an Army friend, Lisa, who during one of our husbands’ deployments said something I’ve never forgotten.

We were sitting on her porch one morning, drinking coffee, and she said:

“I’ve been thinking about what life would be like if our husbands don’t come home.”

Which is not exactly light porch conversation.

And then she said:

“Of course it would be devastating.
We’d need help and counseling.
The kids would need support.

But… at the end of it all, we would be okay.
The kids would be okay.
God would still be with us.
And the sun would still rise the next day.”

What she was naming was hope.

Hope is not the belief that tragedy won’t happen.
It’s the belief that tragedy doesn’t get the final word.

So what does this actually look like in real life?

Not in theory. Not in a movie.
But in real life on a random Monday.

When the house is quiet and your thoughts are not.
When the voices on the news are loud.
When the deployment feels long.
When the uncertainty creeps in—usually around bedtime, because of course it does.

What does choosing hope actually look like?

Two very unglamorous, very practical things:

1. FIND YOUR PEOPLE

You need people.

Not “we like each other’s Instagram posts” people.

Actual, real-life, know-what’s-going-on-in-your-world people.

And here’s the part no one loves:

You have to go find them.

No one is coming to knock on your door and say,
“Hi, I heard you were feeling slightly disconnected and would love a meaningful, mutually supportive friendship.”

If that happens, please call me immediately. I have several questions and possibly a clipboard.

But for the rest of us…

We have to show up.

You go to the thing.
You host the dinner.
You sit at the slightly awkward table.
You say yes when it would be easier to stay home in sweatpants you have no intention of changing out of.

Community is not something you can order online.

It’s more like planting a garden.
It’s slow.
It’s messy.
Sometimes you wonder if anything is happening at all.

And then one day… something grows.

2. BE THE PERSON YOU WISH WOULD SHOW UP

There’s a principle many of us have heard before:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Turns out… it still works.

If you want more encouragement in your life—be encouraging to others.
If you want deeper friendships—go first and say something vulnerable.
If you wish someone had checked on you when you were at a low point—start checking on someone else.

If you wanted someone to show up at your door with cookies when you moved in…

Be the person with the cookies.

This is not complicated.

It’s just inconvenient enough that most of us hesitate.

But we have to do it because this is how we were designed to live.

Not as isolated individuals, white-knuckling it through life,
but as people who are known, supported, and reminded—over and over again—of what’s true when we forget.

And I know this is true because some of the hardest seasons of my life—on paper, the ones that should have been the worst—ended up being some of the best.

For the five years we lived at Fort Bragg, things were tough.

High deployment tempo.
Long separations.
Young kids (with two more babies born in the middle of it all).
Scary, heavy news every day.
Memorial services. Injured friends.

And yet, those were some of the best of our Army years.

Not because they were easy. Far from it.

But because we weren’t alone.

That kind of community doesn’t appear overnight.

It’s built—slowly, imperfectly—long before you need it.

So here’s the thought to leave you with:

It is completely normal to feel fear about what might be around the corner.

That doesn’t make you weak.
It makes you human.

But we don’t have to let fear lead—dictating our choices and shaping our lives.

We can choose hope.

And one of the most powerful ways we do that…
is by refusing to do this life alone.

Because when you are surrounded by people who know you—who show up, who stay, who sit with you in the hard moments—you’re reminded of something that’s easy to forget:

When your mind starts running ahead to everything that could go wrong…
you won’t be facing it by yourself.