by Alexei Laushkin

Let listening to worldly news be bitter food for you, and let the words of saintly men be as combs filled with honey (St. Basil)

In the world of faith in the United States we are entering into a sort of information overload of late. This is true of the pace of society as a whole, people wander from one sensational item to the next, as Christians we have to be careful to guard our internal life against over-consumption, which isn’t just for food.

We don’t want to be caught up in one news story than the next than the next, until such a point where we are left internally exhausted and less able to attend to virtue and character and the natural pacing given to us in the church year, in the prayers of the saints, and in the example of godly men and women from across the ages and across cultures.

When the world around us is giving way, it is the duty of the Christian to re-orient and re-anchor on dependence on Christ. That’s our strong tower, learning to grow in dependence day by day on God and God’s people.

It’s amazing how Jesus himself knew that we needed companionship and partnership in our spiritual endeavors. Jesus sent out the disciples two by two and of the 12 Apostles, we find brothers. Spiritual brotherhood or sisterhood may not look like doing the exact same thing, but it’s a basic helpful orientation to support your fellow or a particular Christian in his day to day through prayer, through a common journey. This often orients around the family but can specifically orient around the local body of Christ. When two or three are gathered in a sustained way to run our daily race well.

This week was filled with news, but perhaps instead of recounting the news, we might take a moment to recalibrate for the long journey, the long obedience in the same direction, and one step in that long obedience, might just be spending more time cultivating an internal life and in prayer and in specific obedience and spiritual discipline instead of getting caught up in more news (click here for some prayer resources).

Let’s take a moment to strengthen the internal so that we have the strength to engage with the news of the day.

Alexei Laushkin is a Board Member of the Kingdom Mission Society, Vice-President of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and writer of the Foolishconfidence blog. His views are his own.