Weathering Change

A call to gentle alarmism in an age of denial

Here in the northeast, we have been buried in plowed piles and drifts of snow for weeks. Temperatures in the single digits have prevented it from even the slightest bit of melt, and even if it has begun to melt, it ices over in treacherous ways. In moments like these, I begin to hear the sarcasm begin to proliferate from climate-change deniers. “Global warming, huh?” they needle their believing counterparts, and then a collective groan hums out because…well…science. These weather extremes are evidence of the planet’s crisis. Proof, not denial.

My fellow writer Courtney Ellis is releasing her newest book soon, Weathering Change: Seeking Peace Amid Life’s Tough Transitions. It’s a book about the weather but also a book about how to meet it instead of fight it. I had a chance to read the book early and write its foreword. It’s a beautiful follow-up to her first book, Looking Up. I’m happy to offer this adapted excerpt from Courtney on Sayable today.

Nature is brilliantly adaptable. If autumn signals a colder winter, ermine and rabbits and squirrels will grow thicker coats of fur. Tear down a bird’s nest and it will build another. Moles, once decidedly forest-dwelling, have learned to thrive in suburbia where verdant lawns hide succulent earthworms, termites, and grubs. We’ve all seen a dandelion sprouting through a crack in the sidewalk. Against all odds, creation finds a way to carry on.

But everyone has their breaking point.

There are so many ways our robust but delicate ecosystems are being pushed to the brink because of the pain of climate change. Storms have become more frequent and severe, temperatures break records over and over again, frosts come later—or not at all. To say that this is not our fault is to miss the point entirely. 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing climate change.¹

It’s near-impossible to find consensus that strong anywhere, but here we are. This is the bed we’ve made.

Contrary to popular belief, a changing climate doesn’t just mean warming. Many weather patterns are becoming stronger and more unpredictable, including cold snaps, deep freezes, and phenomena we have invented new phrases for like “bomb cyclones,” “superstorms,” and “Arctic blasts.”

Creation is resilient, but it is also finely calibrated. While a child with a high fever may be quite ill, one with a very high fever can end up brain damaged—or worse. While one degree of warming or one fewer rainstorm per season may sound small, in reality, each change taxes our planet. Eventually the camel’s back is broken with just one final straw.

It raises the question: what are we to do when facing change that is beyond our control?

Often our agency amidst changes of all sorts is far less than we would prefer. The job we’ve given our best efforts to suddenly informs us that we’ve been made redundant. Our spouse tells us that the marriage is over. A natural disaster rips through, leaving us suddenly, unexpectedly homeless. Where is God when our world careens into chaos? When all we thought was stable and secure is rocked and broken? We may echo the cry of the Psalmist:

Why, Lord, do you stand far off?

Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?²

Nowhere may this feel more pressing than when we look closely at the state of our warming planet. What, Lord, are we to do now?

A few years ago, I attended a lecture at Calvin University’s Festival of Faith and Writing by the writer and professor Marilyn McIntyre. It was entitled “Writing Through a Fog of Fear.”

“Be a gentle alarmist,” she advised the gathered writers in the room. There are things faith and foresight tell us are too important to stop pointing towards. The scientists among us are responsible to prophetically witness to what they see coming while the rest of us heed their research and their warnings. We are all tasked with working for the common good for today and tomorrow and all that lies beyond it. It is not too late until the apocalypse truly arrives. I appreciated McIntyre’s emphasis on doing this hard, good work of raising the alarm with tenderness. Berating, scapegoating, or shaming will rarely win us an interested audience, but if we tread kindly, we may yet bend the ears of the uninterested, the unbelieving, or the apathetic. Even the decided non-virtue of self-interest can potentially wake people enough to care.

When I was in eighth grade, my parents tried to take my sisters and me on a hike in Banff. Our packs were filled with snacks, water bottles topped off, sunscreen applied. As we stood at the trailhead adjusting our sun hats, a cheerful forest ranger came bounding down the trail.

“You may want to reconsider the trail today,” he said, pointing back the way he’d come. The way we were headed. “There are grizzlies just up there. A mama with cubs.” We remained frozen, slowly digesting his words. The campground we were staying at required the viewing of a fifteen-minute safety video that should have been titled, “WHEN BEARS ATTACK” My youngest sister hadn’t slept for days.

“Big ol’ mama,” the ranger concluded, tipping his hat toward us. “Well, enjoy your day!” As he disappeared around the other side of a park service truck, my sisters and I practically climbed over one another to be the first back into the family van. Self-interest can be a powerful motivator.

Gentle alarmists don’t despair, but neither do they let off the gas. The work is too essential. The coming pain too real. We must steward our planet well not simply because we love God’s natural world—which alone should be more than enough reason—but because creation care is one more way of spreading the Good News. As Kyle Meyaard-Schaap notes in, Following Jesus in a Warming World, “In a world wracked by the devastation of rising seas, more extreme weather, and a more unpredictable and dangerous future, this means that practical steps to address the climate crisis are, in fact, acts of evangelism.”³

Creation care is people care, too, another long-term strategy in following the Lord’s imperative: Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the Fatherless; plead the cause of the widow.⁴ It is the poor who often feel the greatest effects of the climate crisis. Advocating for creation however we can—and living out this care in our own lives, too—is one more way of following Jesus wholeheartedly. One more way of slowing down our march toward this painful, global change.

For the unholy split we often see between faith and science is not of God. We are beautifully entwined with the earth, ourselves just one part of God’s good creation, and we ignore that symbiosis at our own peril. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer quotes environmental activist Joanne Macy: “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”⁵

Sadly, the inverse is also true: the more we ravage the earth, the more destitute we will become.

Despair can beckon when we really learn what we’ve done—and continue to do—to our fragile ecosystems. Between fires on the west and east coasts (not to mention in Canada and Mexico), hurricanes along the eastern seaboard, floods in the Midwest and the South, heat domes in the Pacific Northwest, nationwide droughts, and tornadoes from Oklahoma to West Virgina, there are no real climate havens remaining. The crisis knocks at each of our doors. Sooner or later, it will touch us all.

At least some of the despair we may feel around the climate crisis can stem from the helplessness we feel around it. So much of the problem is massive and global, on a scale far out of our control. The state of our climate is largely shaped by the decisions of governments and the short-term, profit-driven choices of massive corporations. We may do what we can, recycle and grow native plants, compost and keep the air conditioning to a minimum, advocate for better policies for the earth and vote our consciences, but our participation is still only a small drop in a very, very big ocean. Watching national and even global choices made that will impact our air, water, plants, and animals negatively can be excruciating. And when we know it didn’t have to be this way it can be much harder to acquiesce to difficult change.

But while the climate crisis may be relatively recent, when viewed in light of the epochs of human existence, the brutality of change outside of our control is as old as humanity itself. We need only look to Scripture, the church mothers and fathers, or the canon of literature to see that this is true. James Baldwin put it this way:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.⁠⁶

Artist Makoto Fujimura calls this the “common curse” a cousin to our more well-known common grace.⁠⁷

We are united in our helplessness. United in the rawness of our need.

There is a weird sort of hope to be found in knowing that we have always existed on the razor’s edge; that humanity has always been close to dooming itself through plague or famine, nuclear winter or global meltdown. Together we must resist the temptation to retreat into apathy or despair, and instead do all we can when we can to address the crisis—and then, somehow, courageously go on living our normal lives. This may sound strange, and yet it is ultimately the ordinary stuff of life that helps tether us to what is true and right and good.

In his 1948 essay, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” C.S. Lewis writes that the first action we must take in the face of potential catastrophe is to “pull ourselves together.” He continues: If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.⁸

To exist in a time of climate crisis is to follow Wendell Berry’s prescription to be joyful, though we’ve considered all the facts. This is far easier said than done. To rejoice in the face of real tragedy is possible, of course, but we are not called to fake happiness. Often the path to joy despite pain runs right through a biblical paradigm that we don’t talk about as often as we should.

The path to embracing joy leads first through lament.

We all have much to lament when it comes to the climate crisis, but other, less global changes may drive us to lament as well. God does not bar us from bringing requests about anything, big or small. It’s a minor tragedy when we decide not to open our hearts in lament because we’ve decided we shouldn’t feel a certain way about something, or that it’s too inconsequential to bother the Almighty with. God is eager to hear our cries, whatever their size. Ready, always, to receive our prayer.

Nearly every change will bring grief along with it, good change as well as bad. We may rejoice at our wedding but lament the loss of the single life we enjoyed or former roommates we loved. We can delight in the birth of a child but mourn our lost nights of sleep. God instructs us to rejoice, but not as a replacement for the vital practice of lament.

Both are part of weathering change.

Sometimes we adapt only because we have to. There is no choice set before us. We all face changes we did not choose; disasters we did not welcome. We will watch as our planet heats and spins, approaching a tipping point that may send us toward our earthly doom. The grief can be crushing. Yet here, too, we will find the Lord. Scripture describes Jesus as a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

We are not alone in the pain of change. The knowledge of this closeness will not solve our suffering, but it can make it less lonely, less isolating. James Baldwin continued his reflection on the universality of suffering by acknowledging the way our pain can connect us to one another: “Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people,” he wrote. There is grace in the ache, not only for us but for those our lives will touch.

We cannot look away. But we must also keep looking up.

Weathering Change releases on February 17th. You can purchase it using this link which will support Nooks, our favorite independent bookstore.

Adapted from Weathering Change by Courtney Ellis. Copyright (c) 2026 by Courtney Ellis. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

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1. Do scientists agree on climate change?” NASA. https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/do-scientists-agree-on-climate-change/

2. Psalm 10:1, NIV.

3. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, Following Jesus in a Warming World,

4. Isaiah 1:17, NIV

5. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 340.

6. Jane Howard, “Telling Talk from a Negro Writer,” Life Magazine, May 24, 1963

7. Makoto Fujimura, X, November 15, 2024,

Makoto Fujimura@iamfujimura

This is what I have called “common curse”, a sister of common grace.

Infinite Books @infinitebooks

James Baldwin for Life Magazine, 1963

3:09 AM · Nov 16, 2024 · 4.71K Views

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8. C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis, 73–74.