Among all the usual New Year’s resolutions, from exercising more to eating less, one seems to be gaining fresh momentum.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, 33% of Americans are setting mental health goals for 2025, which is 5% more than last year. Of those making mental wellness resolutions, 46% intend to spend more time in nature, 44% plan to focus on meditation and 37% are committing to spiritual development.

From these results, it seems more Americans than ever feel a need to find ways to stay in the moment. But what if that moment is terrifying, as it often seems to be when we look at the news, from geopolitical crises to natural disasters?

A week after Christmas, it’s natural to wonder what Jesus might recommend. On the one hand, Jesus is often pitched as the antidote to our anxieties. “Jesus, take the wheel,” Carrie Underwood croons. Yet Jesus also makes a compelling case for embracing and learning from our fear.

Jesus teaches his followers to remain in the moment not only for its own sake, but for the sake of what’s to come. There are myriad ways to interpret this vision, but one thing is certain: Jesus believed he was living on the precipice of a new world. What might this apocalyptic mindset teach us, including non-Christians?

Jesus is desperate for his listeners to understand the stakes of what he says about the day of judgment. What Jesus demands isn’t some capacity to read the tea leaves but a state of hypervigilance, a sharp focus on events unfolding in the real world.

How practical is it, though, for mere mortals to remain on perpetual alert? After 9/11 in the United States and the 7/7 bombings in the United Kingdom, for instance, both countries adopted a spectrum of threat levels to keep citizens vigilant. As these levels hovered between high and extra high, most people became inured to such warnings, despite — or indeed because of — their unceasing severity.

A similar dynamic has stymied action in the face of climate change, even as its effects become more visible and constant, from superstorms to megadroughts. The climate campaigner George Marshall argues that the sheer scope of the problem, and the abstract thinking it requires, runs counter to the ways in which we’re conditioned to perceive threats. Our cognitive skillset, it seems, may be uniquely ill-adapted to an epoch of competing apocalypses.

What does Jesus’ apocalyptic vision bring to the table? Jesus invites us to imagine — and practice imagining — what would happen if the clock were to stop suddenly on the world as we know it. Like a game of musical chairs, where would we be left standing, and how would we justify ourselves?

The uncertain hour of judgment preached by Jesus transcends conventional notions of fairness. It doesn’t happen when we wish for it or are most prepared for it. Imagining our own dramatic end can catalyze a sense of extreme personal and collective responsibility. Faced with overwhelming threats, such radical responsibility can be a precious resource if deployed with the right mixture of hope and horror.

It’s hard to imagine Jesus would be very impressed by our acuity these days, especially when it comes to climate change.

In an ancient land dependent on agriculture, only fools would be so daft as to shut their eyes to beacons of rain or sun. Yet even as the long-term effects of climate change have become brutally apparent — California wildfires burned so intensely in the past year that they released pillars of smoke visible from space — many still refuse to “interpret the appearance of earth and sky.”

We are hypocrites in a way Jesus could scarcely have imagined. As environmental journalist and activist Bill McKibben has strived to make clear, we are living in an unfolding catastrophe of literally biblical scope. We’re capable of conjuring apocalypses on a sublime scale yet unwilling to take even small actions to avert them. Thinking as Jesus encourages us to do demands that we recover a skill we’ve let lapse: the ability to see the future in the present.