Looking at the World through God's Eyes

For me, it meant reformatting my iGoogle homepage.

I took a deep breath, and deleted the RSS feeds to CNN and BBC. Feeling bolder, I then moved my “Verse of the Day” gadget from my random stuff tab (that I looked at once a week) to the main tab, which is in front of my face anytime I open up the Interweb.

I’m a news junkie. Mainly international news, but now that I’ve lived in the US for a few years, I’ve become more interested in what’s going on here. And entertainment news is a guilty pleasure. I chose CNN and BBC as my news outlets of choice because CNN is definitely slanted towards the US, and BBC is definitely slanted away from the US, so I figured I got a balanced view. Plus, those were the two news outlets we could watch in South Asia, so there’s a sentimental factor, too. (BBC’s soundtrack is AWESOME!)

At any rate, I had gotten to the point where I was checking CNN and BBC about 10 times a day. Each. That’s a bad thing for several reasons, but most importantly, I’ve realized that the huge amount of time I was spending studying the horrific problems of our world was discoloring my view of humanity. It was making me doubt the effectiveness of missions. It was making me doubt the power of God.

And I work for World Gospel Mission.

You would think that someone who works for a missions agency would be utterly convinced that God can save the world, and that He is in complete control of how that will happen. But to be quite frank, I was starting to doubt. The images and words that were constantly in front of my face told stories of fear, war, crime, famine, death – and so many people living in utter hopelessness. So, so many people. Under the surface, despair was starting to creep in.

I didn’t even realize it was a problem until a brother in Christ started asking questions I was shocked to find I couldn’t answer. Something needed to change. So that’s why I got rid of the proverbial carrot when I deleted the RSS feeds from my homepage. I vowed to only check CNN and BBC just once per day. And to keep me accountable, my wonderful husband set up something so that it would send him an email if I checked them more than once during the day.

On top of that, I’ve started doing some online Bible studies through Urbana’s website. Urbana is a huge missions convention for students that happens every third year in Urbana, Illinois. The one I’ve started with is all about missions, surprise, surprise. Sometimes in order to heal, we need to get back to the reasons we do what we do.

I’m not trying to bury the problems of the world in a flood of “Christian stuff.” But I need to re-learn to look at the world through God’s eyes. I’m still a global person, but I’m just switching out the lenses that I look at the globe with. I’m not really sure what that means, exactly, but I think at least I’m on the right track.

From Luke 22: “The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”