Tag: World news

Reading the News When Crisis Hits

Living overseas makes checking the news a tricky endeavor, especially in seasons of global crisis like the pandemic or more recently, the war in Ukraine. Reading about these things can be anxiety inducing for a few reasons. When you live far from home, you count on life in your passport country to keep providing stability, a place you can safely retreat to if needed. But when your passport country is struggling alongside the rest of the world, you experience a sense of loss and instability.

Reading the news can be a triggering experience if you have gone through traumatic experiences yourself. The injustice, violence, and pain can make you feel paralyzed, angry or really upset. It can also be challenging to consume news when life around you is draining and uniquely demanding. Your capacity to process hard things happening elsewhere in the world is so much less.

At the same time, as global citizens we can’t afford to not be informed about world events. The world is so connected that what happens in one country often has implications in other parts of the world. If we want to be understanding of the times, we can’t live under a rock. So how do we navigate news consumption? 



1. Know your window of tolerance.
Name honestly what happens to you when you read the news. As humans our emotions are impacted by what we read. We reflect the heart of our Father when we are moved with compassion or when we respond with indignation to the injustice in the world. But if reading the news starts to get in the way of our being able to function well, we may need to step back and consider how to stay within our window of tolerance.

Dan Siegel is the therapist and clinical professor who coined the term “window of tolerance” (WOT). WOT refers to “the best state of stimulation in which you are able to function and thrive in everyday life. When we exist within this window, we are able to learn effectively, play, and relate well to ourselves and others” [source]. Ideally we want to stay within a space where we can self-regulate, stay grounded, and be flexible. If reading the news triggers deep anxiety, overwhelm, numbness, a sense of panic or maybe even a response of flight or fight within us – these are all signs that we are moving away from that state in which we are best able to function in our daily life.

Pay attention to your body’s responses. Stay curious about why specific news has the impact it has on you. Could this news be tapping into unprocessed grief or trauma?

Notice, too, if there is a time of day when things affect you more. Is checking the news before going to sleep disrupting your rest at night? How often are you going online to check news updates?

After you’ve paid attention to these things, be very gentle with yourself and plan accordingly. Is there specific news you need to avoid for a while? Maybe ask someone who loves you to filter the news and share with you what you can handle. There really is no shame in that, friend. Or maybe, set a time of day when you check the news, and then don’t check it again that day. And if you are really struggling, it really is okay to say, “I can’t handle this right now.” Know yourself and steward your capacity to process information.



2. Actively stay within the circle of your responsibility.
While it is true that we want to be informed and cultivate compassion toward suffering in the world, our primary calling is to stay present and tender-hearted for those in our immediate circle of influence. If you are anything like me, once in a while you need to do a heart-check and discern: what is within my circle of responsibility and what is within my circle of concern? Sometimes I have even had to write it all down and create two lists:

What things are my responsibility (things that God has called me to)?

What things are only a concern (things that God is calling me to entrust to him)?

Seeing it in black and white in front of me is helpful, so I can properly cast my cares on him. Thankfully all my cares (both the ones that I am responsible for and the ones I need to entrust to him) are his cares. They matter to him. So he is able to equip me to engage faithfully where he wants me to and also to give away to him what I really can’t change or influence. I am so thankful he cares so much for all of me, and that I am within his circle of responsibility and commitment.

 

3. Hunt for beauty every day.
Finally, when life is heavy and it seems we can’t escape its excruciating crush, become a beauty hunter. In the rich mercy of our Father, beauty strengthens the soul to face grief.

When we are struggling to live in the love of the Father, chasing beauty is just what the doctor ordered. Choose a project that will breathe life and hope into your soul:

-hang flowers on the porch
-go on picnics on poppy-covered fields
-bake favorite desserts with your family
-have dance parties
-explore favorite markets
-admire the sunset
-sing worship songs
-read poems while drinking tea
-behold breathtaking cliffs or
-gaze at star-filled night-time skies

Beauty opens our eyes to the steadfast love of the Lord even when darker colors inhabit the landscape of our lives. It is what shelters us in the day of trouble, enabling us to believe we will see our Father’s goodness in the land of living.

 

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

World Events & the Fragility of Goodness

It’s a Monday and depending on where you are in the world, and in what time zone you woke up, you have most likely been assaulted by different headlines around the globe.

  • In Indonesia, divers are still searching wreckage for the tragic air crash that killed all those aboard.
  • Lebanon considers a tighter lockdown as Covid-19 cases surge
  • Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders are in Russia for talks
  • Snow and ice disrupt lives in Spain
  • China denies coercive birth control methods
  • And the United States is rumbling with the fallout of an insurrection that stormed the capital building, with resultant shouts for another impeachment of the sitting president.

No matter where you are, it’s a lot. All of these call for prayer and some call for a deep soul searching lament for the state of the world. And none of these headlines include our personal tragedies and sadness, our collective displacement and loss.

But this is the world we live in, the world we engage in on a daily basis. We can wisely shut off the news for a while, we can wisely disengage for a certain number of hours in a day and week. But we can’t escape our world, nor are we called to.

It’s within this context that I have been thinking a lot about “goodness” – that word that speaks to the quality of being kind, virtuous, morally good. What does it mean to grow into goodness, to grow beyond the childlike attribute of being “good” and grow into someone whose character makes you think of true goodness.

As children, many of us hear the words “Be good” on a regular basis. “Be good for grandma!” “Be good to your brother!” It is said so often that it sometimes loses both its meaning and its power. Perhaps the importance of how we can mature into goodness is also lost along the way, lost in a world that doesn’t necessarily reward goodness beyond childhood. Instead, being savvy, smart, intellectual, and quick-tongued and quick penned are what gives us an edge in many spheres.

As I’ve thought about goodness, I came upon the story of Bulgaria’s Jews in World War 2 as relayed in a book I am reading called The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. In this particular section, the author is telling the story of a Jewish family in Bulgaria who ended up in Palestine. Central to their survival in Bulgaria is the larger story of the Jews in Bulgaria.

A deportation order had been written that would deport all of Bulgaria’s 47,000 Jews. Unlike most of Europe, this planned deportation was never carried out. It wasn’t carried out because ordinary people and leaders found out about it. The Metropolitan and the Bishop of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church stood up for the Jews, approaching places of power and “imploring the king to demonstrate compassion by defending the right to freedom and human dignity of the Jews.” A member of parliament (Dimitar Peshev) publicly went against his government, gathering signatures and approaching the king stating that a deportation “would be be disastrous and bring ominous consequences upon the country.” Along with these, leaders of professional organizations and businesses, and ordinary people across the country stood by the Jewish population.

The deportation order was stopped temporarily in March of 1943, and then indefinitely in May. The Jewish population of the entire nation of Bulgaria did not die in gas chambers.

The author goes on to say this:

“None of this would have happened withough what the Bulgarian-French intellectual Tzvetan Todorov calls the ‘fragility of goodness’: the intricate, delicate, unforeseeable weave of human action and historical events”

Evil spreads quickly and virulently. Like a virus, it is hard to stop once it takes root. Todorov says that once it is introduced into public view, it spreads easily, whereas goodness is temporary, difficult, rare, fragile. And yet possible.

I have been thinking about this story and the idea of the fragility of goodness all week. Each person in Bulgaria who spoke up for the Jews, people who were their friends, their neighbors, their business partners, and their community members, is a chain in the link of goodness that ultimately preserved life and human dignity. While Tdorov speaks to the fragility and the “tenuous chain of events” that led to a stay in the deportation order, maybe it is not as tenuous as he supposes. Maybe what appeared tenuous and fragile was far stonger then he could imagine.

In my experience, goodness is far stronger than we know, far more powerful than it may appear. Its power is in its moral strength and its stubborn refusal to quit. That’s what I see, not only in this story, but in the small ways that goodness moves in, refusing to give up, determined that evil will not have the final word.

How can I chase goodness the way I chase beauty? When will I get to the point where I choose good without even thinking because it is so much a part of me? I don’t know. But it gives me hope when I think of ordinary people going about their lives in Bulgaria in 1943, deciding that they would speak up and out, never knowing that they would be a part of a chain called the fragility of goodness.

In all of this, I am reminded of Christ, the author of goodness, the one who strengthens the fragility of goodness making it into a force that challenges and destroys evil, for it is he who daily calls me, who daily calls all of us in this community, to chase after goodness, truth, and beauty.

Note: all quotes are from The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan