I Made a Mistake

Eeek, Gasp, Alert the media! Not that kind of mistake, nor is it my first by any means. No, my mistake this morning was a simple matter of precedence. Instead of coming in from my walk full of ideas, then choosing one to write a devotional, I did the awful thing. Yes, I opened a news website and read a few articles. Worse, after one of them I read some of the ever-present parade of opinions regarding the state of our nation. Next thing ya know, all those ideas God gave me during our morning stroll had left me as the pain and despair of the world washed over my thoughts. My fault, no one to blame but myself. Now, I struggle to come up with a good idea for a devotional.

Dark thoughts are so very easy to come by in this world. The pain and suffering in every nation and state is too much for us to take in every day. We must use our God-given discretion to know when to watch the news and when to leave it alone. Certainly any writing given in honor of God should come before the news of tragedies. There must be a lesson in that somewhere. Pray and walk with God, lots of ideas for devotional writing come to me. Read the news and eat corn flakes, the good thoughts are blown out by the sin and pain and tragedy and hurting and suffering and... Hmm, maybe I'm on to something here. My mind belongs to God now, perhaps my watching must be done with more wisdom.

In our guard duties during military service, we rotated shifts. No one was allowed to guard all night without rest and officers of the watch were tasked with making sure that did not happen without a very good cause. That does not always happen in the corporate world, because, well, we might as well face it, corporations staffed with smart people can still act very stupidly. In our walk with Christ, it may very well be that we need to rotate watches. I don't mean that you should trade timepieces with someone else, but that we may want prevent a brother in Christ from watching too much news. And it can be quite addictive to watch news web sites and shows every day, several times a day, or even constantly. All of this news can be overwhelmingly depressing. To maintain our watchfulness, we may want to share this duty between us. Should something important happen, such as the two witnesses from Revelation 11 arriving outside the temple in Jerusalem, we can tell each other quickly enough.

Have a great day in Christ Jesus. Enjoy the Saturday, and go easy on the news,
Bucky