John the Baptist sends word to Jesus from his prison cell, asking, “Are you the one?” John has spent his entire life preparing the way for Jesus, but from his prison cell, now certainly facing death, the future looks grim. Like John, even the most confident of us wonder from time to time: Is all this work worth it? Does anything I do matter? Am I on the right track? We can’t always see the fruits of our labor, yet God is at work anyway. How might we, like Jesus and Isaiah, point to the places where God is at work in our world? How might we keep hope alive?

Luke begins his gospel by orienting us within “the time of King Herod,” and we begin the series by fleshing out what it might have been like to live in the days when Jesus was born—a time not all that different from our own. As an elderly priest, Zechariah had witnessed the fall of Judean independence and the beginning of Roman occupation. He longed for the coming Messiah, and he longed for a son. The author of Lamentations cries out in personal pain while his homeland is under Babylonian rule. Our global and personal heartache are intertwined, and the wait for promised rescue is hard to bear. Whether in exile, under the rule of a puppet king, or in the depths of personal pain, we long for God to break through the fear and bring us hope.

You can read Rev. Dr. MLK Jr's sermon on fear here.
Olivia Guy-Evan's article "Fight, Flight, Fereze, Or Fawn: How We Respond to Threats" here.
If the idea of fawning as a response to threat is new to you you can listen to an interview with Dr. Ingrid Clayton, author of Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find our Way Back here. (Unfortunately this is behind a paywall, but ypou might have access to it through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.)
One of the many sources for the content of this series is the book Hope: A User's Manual by MaryAnn McKibben Dana.