However, when she saw how her trial related to Jehovah and his purpose, she was able to cope and to regain emotional strength. She said: “Understanding why this was happening helped me to remember that it is for Jehovah that I find myself in these circumstances. That has helped me to stop thinking about myself.”10. How can Jehovah be our Rock

We make Jehovah our Rock by focusing on the kind of Person he is and by keeping his purpose fixed firmly in our mind. Doing so can help us to remain stable emotionally while we endure trials. (Ps. 16:8) That was true of a sister named Tatyana, who was placed under house arrest because of her faith. “I found myself literally on my own,” she said. “It was challenging at first

the days ahead, we will encounter trials that will require us to lean on Jehovah as never before. Now is the time to strengthen our conviction that he will provide whatever we need to endure faithfully. How can we do that? Read Bible accounts and experiences of modern-day Witnesses. Discern how God has displayed rocklike qualities to support his servants. Think deeply about those accounts. Doing so can help you to make Jehovah your Rock.

To defeat entrenched cynicism, we will need hope — anti-cynicism candidates, backed by an anti-cynicism party, promoted through an anti-cynicism process. We will need shared goals — stories about the future. We will need shared pathways — clear processes, and touchpoints for the public along the way. And we will need a sense of agency — the trust that leadership is listening, and responsive to us along the way.

We’ve needed that all along. And the Democrats just created an opportunity

Trump Is Scary. Cynicism Is Worse
This level of cynicism is dangerous to any democracy. It’s fatal for a country like America, one of the few countries in the world whose national myth is predicated on the future — the U.S. is a young country with a short history and multiple origin stories, but what brings us together is an agentic sense of the future. We look ahead, out of a desire and belief that we have a chance to build the best days of our collective lives. In other words: We have hope.

But Biden also fatally violated trust in the system. His cynicism emerged more slowly, as his team repeatedly refused to engage with the question of his cognitive fitness. The signs were there for months, from failing to proactively position his VP as his ready successor, to failing to encourage primary participation to engage and encourage his base. But it wasn’t obvious until the debate, when his disastrous performance revealed the plain truth of his condition to millions of Americans, and the aftermath, when he ensconced himself with advisors and refused to leave or engage on his condition in good faith. The message to the public became, loud and clear: I’m the only candidate to beat Trump, and it’s worth anything, even repeated violations of the will of the people, including my own base, to make that happen. The ends had come to fully justify the means.

Both candidates participated in the production of cynicism. And in doing so, they both alienated a vital constituency of the American public: People who believe in democracy as a process — as the means itself toward a better end.

Psychologist C.R. Snyder describes hope as made up of three core components: Goals, pathways (how you get toward your goals), and agency (the belief you can actually participate in these pathways).

As a result? We’ve spent the last four weeks living within not one but two party-wide cynicisms, colliding at the same time. Trump supporters’ cynicism in the system, and Biden supporters’ cynicism in their candidate, left the majority of America not just unhappy about their choices, but wondering if we even had a choice, and a shared process, at all.

healthy democracy operates by several heuristics for social life that, until today, were totally absent from this presidential race. If we want a healthier range of possible ends in our democracy, whether we’re headed into an open convention, a Harris appointment, or some combination of both, we have to figure out a way to reclaim these civic heuristics as means along the way. We have to go all in on restoring trust with voters.

Biden Dropping Out Puts Us Back in a World Where Hope (& Agency) Has a Chance
What will happen next? Impossible to say (exciting, right? In a good way!). Regardless of path, right now Democratic leadership has opened up a new window for civic participation in our process. By doing this, they’ve taken an urgent first step to reconnecting our system of governance with the will of the people.