Simmer down.
January 27, 2010 (Wednesday)
Most homes in the United States have a television set and many of those homes now have computers and other communication devices of various kinds. The effect of this is the creation in your home of an information network unlike anything the world has ever known.
The impact of this information deluge is staggering in importance. We know what’s happening in the world, many times as it happens. If you were watching CNN when the war in Iraq began, you saw for yourself what was happening in Baghdad. The sky lit up with the light of missiles and explosions. We who live in the present day have been able to see for ourselves what is happening thousands of miles away.
With 24-hour news channels, and all sorts of additional communication today, we know more than any generation about what is happening in the world. Consequently, we get the impression that the world is more dangerous than ever before. The freezes are colder, the summers hotter, the wars more bloody, the accidents more numerous, the natural disasters more frequent, etc. etc. One wonders if such is actually the case. Or do we just have much more information available to us?
When Krakatoa and Vesuvius erupted, the atmosphere of the earth was affected, but how many people around the world knew what had happened? Before we settled San Francisco, how many devastating earthquakes hit California? How many hurricanes hit the U.S. coast before our ancestors arrived over here? For that matter, how many objects from space hit this country before the pioneers arrived?
There has always been a lot going on in the world, but we just have not known about it.
Today we know much about what’s happening elsewhere. And that knowledge tends to make us more anxious, causing us to worry more. Maybe we need to “simmer down” and trust the Lord completely. Perhaps we should worry less and pray more. It wouldn’t hurt us to watch more Bill Gaither specials and fewer yelling contests masquerading as political commentary. The world may not be in as bad shape as we think.