The year 2020 was difficult for many humans in many different ways as government and media ramped up global control over our lives. Isolation, illness, income loss and inability to care for ourselves and our families in ordinary ways left few emotions or mental states unvisited as effect.
Like many, November, 2020, left me feeling unmoored from humanity, adrift in a world of questions without answers that shattered the bedrock of understanding I'd formed about my country, politics, psychology and human relations over the course of my adult life.
Watching MSNBC and CNN 'reporters' from my 8th floor hotel room on Pennsylvania Avenue, 'reporting' activities that were neither present via their live feed, nor what I could see outside my window was so infuriating as to be psychologically scarring. Knowing that viewers were being grosly mislead without a single thing I could do to stop it brought a feeling of lack of control over my life and being I'd only conceived through the pages of some dystopic novel like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.
Knowing my friends and I had come to DC with high hopes, clean hearts and right motives to stand with hundreds of thousands of others of the same mind and beliefs made it unbearable to accept the narrative we were being fed via live media about ourselves. Watching people who not only didn't know us personally, but hated us simply because we were there, make blanket and false generalizations about us was too incomprehensible to parse rationally. My mind felt like the infinitely spinning circle on a computer screen furiously searching for something to answer it's query.
Once home, my mind was no quieter. For months I couldn't sleep through a night without waking - my mind racing with questions I couldn't answer to my own satisfaction. I furtively dumped all the legacy social media and tech I felt I could and signed up for any and all independent news alerts I thought would bring the clarity I craved through every fiber of my being. I had to know "Why?" and the answer to the ever-present followup question, "What do I do about it?"
I ruined my neck and eyesight craning over my phone at every conceivable and possible moment. I strained many a close relationship as I found ways to argue and fight about things so small as to be imperceptible. I felt like a rat trapped in a cage unable to gnaw my way out....
For some reason (I'm sure it was because I felt I didn't have time) I had stopped reading my Bible regularly over a year ago. For some reason, I hadn't stopped to think about - or notice - the effect that absence was having on/in my life - until I was prompted to take up the practice again.
Some months ago, I started with my Daily Bread phone app every morning after my chores and before exercising - reading their short devotionals while simultaneously allowing my mind to mull over and consider each line and paragraph of the Bible verses prescribed for that day in the linear progression of New and Old testaments to finish the book in a year.
Almost immediately my mind began to right as I discovered the following things:
1. As Solomon so wisely remarked, "There is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9. Everything humans are doing now has been done since the dawn of humans. This is somehow the most emotionally calming knowledge of all. For centuries, wars have raged and hate has flared causing humans to do stunningly inhumane things to one another, yet human beings still exist to war and hate - and inspire peace, goodwill and love.
2. Oppression has always plagued humans. Regardless of color or ethnicity, people have been enslaved, debased and degraded - no peoples of the world have escaped the wrath of evil in whatever form it's found. Humans are not suddenly 'racist' or 'sexist' or immoral, humans have always been that, only right living has stopped that.
3. Right living - not engaging in activities which most often bring physical or psychological distress - creates physical and psychological peace and right living can only be achieved through belief in the God of the Bible, Jesus, His son and following the prescriptions for right living laid out in His Word.
4. God has helped righteous - not perfect - people who have turned from sin, been forgiven and asked for His help. Though we may feel alone, we're not. We've a steady hand to rely on should we choose to do so.
5. Humans have always gone their own way, but they have prospered - even if only in spirit - when they've returned to measuring truth by the infallible and inspired word of the Lord through the Bible.
No one knows tomorrow but God. The best we can possibly do, is read His written record, follow it to the best of our ability - measuring it for truth against the word of the world - and put one step in front of the other every day believing He will guide us on the path to victory in whatever battle we fight.
DO NOT LOSE HOPE! There is much more than what we see in front of our faces - we have only to decide to believe and follow.
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