What Dreams May Come

February 8, 2017

Day 39: Tuning Into The News Maker:
"Now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing.  Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable.  Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise." —Philippians 4:8

Perfect lesson for today.  Dr. Anderson begins with the understatement of the century: "In today's world, it is easy to be distracted from things that are true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. All [anyone] has to do is turn on the news! The news seems to be the antithesis of everything described in today's verse."

His advice: One, limit how much time we spend watching/reading/listening to the news; and two, pray.  Not that we should put our heads in the sand, but we should "focus our attention on the one who can solve all these unsolvable problems." Rather than focusing on the problems themselves, we should focus on "the blessings that God has granted us" and pray for God to intercede.

Right now I have mixed emotions about his advice. Yes, I believe we need to pray and we need to not be overly focused on the negative, but we also need to act. I realize that Anderson, at the time he wrote this book, was not dealing with the exact situations we are currently dealing with. The news has always been a harbinger of "tragedy, heartache, and terror, and brokenness." However, today our own government is a threat to our democracy and to the ideals upon which it was formed. Trump seems to be doing everything in his power to dismantle all that is "true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable" about our country. It is so hard to simply just pray.

I do not know God's plan in all of this. So, as I sit here typing, my heart is torn. I vacillate between rage over what is happening, despair at my inability to stop it, and hope for what God may do with it. My dream and sincerest hope is that God will use this time to bring our country together, that the media will unite and start reporting the facts without the biased slant, that Christians will reevaluate their actions to see if they are truly in line with God's will and if not, they will change their actions and mindsets accordingly, that globally we will realize that all is not well and that we must stand together to fight tyranny, injustice, racism, elitism, and fascism.

I do not know why all of this is happening now or how God plans to use these current events. What I do know is that God is faithful, that I will do all I can to resist evil, and that I still believe in what dreams may come.