How To Turn on the Light When Fear Is Swooping
I have a confession to make: I am afraid of things that don't exist.
Not ghosts or monsters under the bed. I outgrew those...mostly. No, I'm talking about the imaginary monsters I construct out of thin air whenever I face a new deadline, a hard conversation, or an unexpected season of life. I can build something terrifying out of nothing, and sadly, I'm quite good at it.
Turns out, I'm in good company. Not just with other anxious humans, but with ancient settlers who looked up into the twilight sky and panicked over a little bird called the nighthawk.
By name alone, the nighthawk sounds ferocious. Something with hawk in the title ought to have razor-sharp talons, a hooked beak, and zero patience for your nonsense. Early observers watched it swooping through the dusk and slapped the most fearful label they could find on it: Hawk. Done.
The terror only grew worse from there. During mating season, the male nighthawk climbs high into the dim sky, then plunges earthward at breakneck speed. At the last possible second, he flares his wings, and the wind rushing through his stiff primary feathers produces a loud, booming ROAR. If you were standing in the dark below, you would believe something massive and hungry was diving straight for your head. Heart pounding, legs moving. Gone.
But if you ever got a close look at a nighthawk, your terror would dissolve into a giggle.
First of all, it's not even a hawk. It belongs to a completely different bird family. Second, those terrifying "talons"? They're tiny and weak. So weak, in fact, that the nighthawk can't even perch on a branch like a normal, self-respecting bird. It has to lie flat along the wood just to stay upright. I find this deeply relatable on my worst days.
And that fearsome beak? A tiny little triangle, but with a mouth that opens practically ear to ear and is lined with bristles, so the nighthawk can just fly around gaping while mosquitoes wander in on their own. It doesn't hunt. It doesn't fight. It doesn't claw anything. It is basically a big-mouthed, weak-footed, harmless little bug vacuum. The "monster" we feared? A glorified gaping grin on wings.
Oh, how perfectly God illustrates our lives through creation.
I do this constantly. I look into the "dim light" of a project I'm not sure how to start, a difficult conversation I've been putting off, or a big event looming large on the horizon, and I immediately slap a terrifying label on it. Impossible. Overwhelming. Guaranteed disaster.Certain to break me and my feeble body. Then I hear the roar, that swooping boomof what-ifs and worst-case scenarios, and I freeze. I procrastinate. I avoid the very thing God has placed in my path because, in the dark of my own anxiety, it looks exactly like something about to take my head off.
But Psalm 56:3 says, "What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee."
Notice what the psalmist does not say. He does not say, "When I have it all figured out, I will trust in thee." He does not say, "When the monster turns out to be harmless, I will trust in thee." He trusts in the middle of the fear. Before the lights come on.
That is where the Holy Spirit steps in, friend. He is our discernment and our courage all at once. When we stop running from the roar and instead walk toward it prayerfully, with God's Word in hand and His peace standing guard over our hearts, we almost always discover that the thing we were dreading has no actual teeth. No talons. No power to destroy us.
The enemy is a master of auditory illusions. He loves to create the boom in the dark and let our imaginations do the rest. But II Timothy 1:7 tells us plainly: "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." A sound mind is not one that invents nighthawks and calls them monsters.
The next time fear goes diving at your head with a roar, don't run. Take a breath. Step into the light of God's Word, walk forward in faith, and take a good, long look at the thing you've been dreading.
Odds are, it's just a weak-footed bird with a very big mouth.
🔍 PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN: A Peek at the Study Behind This Post
Most people have no idea that the nighthawk isn't actually a hawk at all. I didn’t. But that strange little fact of misidentification is exactly what sparked this entire devotion. A bird terrorizing people for centuries simply because it sounded like something dangerous? That felt like a parable in feathers.
Here's how the study unfolded:
Start with the creature, not the concept. While doing my daily study on animals in the Bible, I came upon the nighthawk. I was a bit hesitant about the study because I had recently studied the hawk and didn’t want to repeat the work I had already done. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a nighthawk is not a hawk at all! From there, the research began with a basic question: So, why is the nighthawk called a hawk?
Dig into the behavior that caused the fear. The booming dive display (the "boom dive" or "winnowing") is a documented mating behavior. Researching it through ornithology sources revealed the exact mechanism — wind through the primary feathers — which painted the perfect word picture of something terrifying that is actually... just wind through feathers or a lot of hot air.
Ask the spiritual "so what." The bridge question for every nature devotion is: What does this reveal about human nature or our walk with God? The pattern here was unmistakable: we misname, mislabel, and misidentify our fears, and those labels paralyze us more than the actual thing.
Search the Scriptures. A search through fear-related passages surfaced Psalm 56:3, which is remarkable because it doesn't say don't be afraid. It says while I am afraid, I will trust. That nuance is gold. II Timothy 1:7 then provided the capstone: God's antidote isn't just courage; it's a sound mind, the very faculty we lose when we catastrophize.
Let the application go further than the anecdote. The nighthawk story is the setup; the enemy's use of "auditory illusion" is where the real spiritual meat lives. Cross-referencing how Satan uses fear as a paralysis tool (rather than just a feeling) opened the door to the "boom in the dark" language, rooting the application in spiritual warfare without making it heavy-handed.
⏱️ Total study time: about 2 hours, including a delightful 45-minute rabbit trail into nightjar folklore that didn't make the final cut, but was absolutely worth it.
Want to try this yourself? Pick any creature, plant, or natural phenomenon that surprised you this week and ask: What does this reveal about the way God made us or the way the enemy works? Then open your concordance, search for the feeling or behavior at the heart of your observation, and follow the trail. You'll be amazed what turns up.