Sunday 3 March 2013

Coping with the Bad News


Deleting items from my inbox is becoming a ritual. How did all these fear driven, conspiracy motivated, condemning religious people get my email anyway? I am tired of hearing about ghastly Muslim extremists, gays, bad government decisions, bad priests and bad doctrine or just bad news in general. Stop!

There seems to be a mindset in so many “Christians” online that just seem to wallow in the mire of all this stuff. I just don’t care anymore for all these issues. I also don’t care for patriotic or sentimental ‘gooshy’ emails that turn faith into emotional slop. I rate them alongside pictures of puppies or kittens, beautiful sunsets or flowers and I have reached saturation point. My delete key is becoming overworked.
There, I feel better for a bit of a rant but there is an issue here. Mostly it is the sense of having been plundered or robbed of something when I hear or read this rubbish. My faith is affected, my joy is diminished and my ability to hear from the Holy Spirit is turned off while I deal with the impact of the imagery I have been subjected to. These things threaten the value of reading the word of God in the morning and are as useful as a handful of sand in my gearbox.
The cure is simple: Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” 

How can the Holy Spirit speak through us while our hearts and minds are dominated by fear-filled junk we learned from the media or the Internet? Do we really need to know?

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