Get Your Life Back

Recently John was on the road with his family. Mrs. Poet was scrolling through Instagram when she suddenly slammed her phone down in exasperation exclaiming “everyone is so angry all the time!”

Everywhere you look/scroll/swipe you see nothing but anger or protests or riots. If you’re not mad already you could be mad about any of the following (just to name a few) : racism, sexism, socialism, communism, media bias, gun rights, coronavirus, hate speech, Hillary Trials, China, Russia, ANTIFA, ISIS, or riots. 

But if you’re not angry, you’re forced to see how everyone else’s life is better than yours. No wonder we’re struggling with envy, strife, anger, and confusion.

A sober look at what’s going on will show us a way out of this media overload. Are we able to checkout from all of it?

Putting it in Perspective.

The cartoon movie Wall-E may be helpful. In a dystopian future all of these gelatinous bodied people zoom around a spaceship with a screen inches from their face paying little to no attention to the world around them. Occasionally they’ll bump into one another and realize there’s a REAL world outside of their “screentopia” they’ve forgotten about.

Let’s make sure we don’t become gelatinous people, enslaved to technology. Don’t buy into the culture of outrage and offense that permeates our media outlets, telling us to be constantly connected and taking all the breaking “news” as truth. Slow down. Get context.

To quote author John Eldredge, “Your soul needs a better pace of life than your smartphone can provide.”

If we’re honest about it, we need to spend less time on our smartphones. We prefer distraction, because the world is tough to understand. Why should we try?

If we don’t start paying attention to our REAL world we’ll end up bumping into REAL problems and not having REAL solutions. We haven’t prepared. We’ve been happy with our distractions.

We Warrior Poets need to be better than that. We should not be so easily manipulated, so easily enslaved. There is a need for us to be leaders in facilitating real conversations around real issues without getting emotional – to be examples of level-headedness in a world that seems to be on fire.

WPS encourages you to disconnect from your devices for just a little while. Go for a walk. Read a bit of your Bible. Take a few deep, intentional breaths.