reminded.

I abhor watching the news.

Fear-based reporting.  Sensationalizing the vulgar, the mediocre, the irreverent and the irrelevant.

It’s a wasteland.

Mostly I’d prefer to bury my head in the sand.

Focus on the lives in the view finder of myself and ignore the rise and the fall of all that is outside of my realm or reality.

However.

I know this isn’t entirely wise.  I know this isn’t holy.  I know this isn’t living the command of loving your neighbor and loving the world.

And so I catch a video of a current news story.  I scan the headlines at CNN.com.  I read the Sunday paper while the kids peruse the comics.

And I feel sick.  Tired.  Appalled.  Horrified.

I’d like to go back ten minutes before I ever knew this or that kind of malice existed.  Before an image or an idea or a word in print scratched its ugly self into a wrinkle on my brain.

The knowing seems worse somehow.

The solutions more difficult to summon.

And my friend Fear pulls up a seat and joins me for a spell.

I cannot protect my children.  I cannot rescue them always and I cannot pave the road ahead of them and create an obstacle-free life.  (I’m pretty sure I don’t even want to do that.)

Kevin and I bantered back and forth this weekend about all of this.

My cries of sadness for the state of What Is and my wishes for a world that didn’t make children victims and that didn’t create scenarios where the majority of people say nothing when bad things happen and a world that sells sex in the form of suggestive underwear for nine year olds and a world that says men only love skinny women in tight clothes and being a bully takes you exactly where you want to go and a world that makes a television celebrity out of a person who was merely born with a specific last name.

And Kevin reminded me:

God is sovereign.  He knows.

And that there has always been dark and there has always been evil.

And God is allowing us to work through Him to try to raise children that are light.

I needed to be reminded.

I will need to be reminded next week when I read another story of the depraved nature of mankind or I walk into a mall and see what girls think they need to wear to be beautiful.

I will need to be reminded.

God is sovereign.