If I governed my life by the content of daily news, I would be in constant terror. The news gives me no hope for today, let alone the future. The economy is collapsing. Public officials are completely corrupt. Global weather is headed either for fire or ice, and it is all our fault. The air is polluted. The water is polluted. Life forms are going extinct faster than shoes are snatched up at the annual winter clearance sale.

It’s a hopeless situation, and there appears to be nothing we can do about it.

I reject all the bad news that falls on my ears daily.

I don’t reject facts, and mixed in with worldly wise prophecies and avuncular advice there actually are some facts. However, filtering through the rhetoric and finding the facts is harder than it used to be, because the kind of journalism that presented information while studiously avoiding bias and interpretation is dead. Journalists in print or on the web all seem to believe they have been called to be the caretakers of the rest of us. They write and “report” as if it were their job to tell us how to interpret data. Furthermore, the ability to interpret data in a way that portends disaster appears to be the highest journalistic achievement. It is enough to send anyone into clinical depression.

I am not depressed. To be truthful, I confess that the news is depressing. The facts I extract from the news reports are not encouraging. However, I choose to base my attitudes on something other than the daily news. I hope in God.

In the Bible, there are numerous stories of human encounters with God or his angels. In most instances, the first words from the mouth of the heavenly messenger are “Do not be afraid.” When shepherds suddenly saw a choir of angels in the night sky, they were terrified, but the angel said, “Don’t be afraid.” When the disciples saw someone walking toward them on the water of the Sea of Galilee, they were scared, too, and Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid.” If we are not to be afraid when God injects himself into history, then I believe we should not be afraid of anything human beings might be able to do.

I see alarming facts in the world around me, but I believe that when God looked at creation and said it was very good, He knew what he was talking about. The universe is an amazing place. The laws of physics are astonishing, and reliable. DNA is the backbone of every living thing, powerful enough to keep working for millennia, flexible enough to adapt to every environmental change that has happened on earth. God does good work, and we can count on him.

At the peak of his creative work, God created people. While it is popular and entertaining to focus on the weakness and quirks of human beings, the real truth is that humans are as amazing as any other part of creation, and by that gracious act of inhaling the breath of God, humans are created with abilities that put all the other elements of creation in the shade. 

We fail, and we fail spectacularly. However, we succeed spectacularly as well. God values us so much as part of his creation that he came down to live among us as a human. He showed us how to succeed, and then he died and rose again in order to cleanse us from all our failures.

No matter what I see in the world around me, no matter what journalists tell me to believe, I don’t see anything that trumps the message God gave us in Christ, “Don’t be afraid. I love you.” God doesn’t want us to be afraid of anything. He wants us to become the fulfilled and happy people he created us to be. We still have to deal with the facts, but we don’t have to be destroyed by negative interpretations. The book of Revelation shows us how to interpret the daily news: “Don’t be afraid. God wins.”