Whether it's Larry King and the national media or the local news reporter in nearby Jacksonville, most news outlets have their attention on the disaster we presently see in Haiti. We look at the horrific scenes, shake our heads, feel an emotional tug toward those who are hurting while simultaneously feeling the sense of helplessness to come to their rescue, only to quickly return to the NFL playoffs or the American Idol auditions.
Not that sports events or singing competitions are inherently evil (I, for one, enjoy them both), but have you ever considered just how little we in our media driven culture can focus our attention for any significant amount of time on the things that matter most? Maybe you have experienced the difficulty of enjoying a conversation over a meal with a friend because he or she is distracted by the constant Facebook and Twitter updates sent to their Blackberry?
It's nice to have the abundance of information that we have from the internet and our mobile devices, but it seems to me that our information overload has many of us spread too thin. As one has said, our culture is amusing itself to death. We forget the blessing of silence and meditation because we have no room for dead air.
Let's enjoy our technology, be thankful for it, and use it wisely; but do not "hide yourself from your own flesh" (Isaiah 58:7). Intentionally silence the media for a specified time by turning off the radio, the television, the computer, or silencing the phone, and use the time to pray for those in Haiti today and to meditate on the goodness of God to you if you have been spared from such a tragedy.
1 comments:
Post a Comment