Today I made my cup of coffee, said good morning to God and opened my news feed to catch up with the world. As you can tell, I like to procrastinate about writing in this space. The attraction of checking on the world with my i- things is tempting. The more I do that the more noisy the world seems. And the more distant God seems to be until I remember there is nothing going on in his world he can't handle. He doesn't need me to supervise. It is hard to hear the violence in our world's words and actions. If I stay connected long I find myself getting discouraged about the goodness in myself and others. Words have been turned into weapons. Our words have real power. Name calling, blaming and shaming others for being different or character assasination because they got what we wanted is telling God whatever or whoever he has made he has made a mistake. It can lead us to taking bad actions that harm others. I want to be careful with that. God doesn't make mistakes. He didn't start with me or you or them. I want my actions to put good in the world not the thoughtless acts of other people's words.
Today it was back to the new excuse for doing this: personal politics. I wondered about the original meaning of politics. I looked it up. Here it is my friends. It might surprise you to know that the definition was "activity associated with the governance of the country and especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power." There it was: power. We are being called to the war between politicians and news people wanting the power or the profit from our thinking and decisions. Our thoughts & feelings are being hijacked to help someone else in their pursuit of power. They will neither know or care about the damage we do if we choose to follow the noise off into action. People don't handle power well. History tells us that. Yet God tells us it's a respected gift. Without the God of our understanding we turn power into our right to take instead of give, our addiction to get but never give and our excuse to bully others into giving us what we want regardless of what it might cost them. Pursuit of power is part of the pride thing that causes us to fall. But God gave us real power. We have the power to say I don't play that game. We don't have to react or respond. We have that power. We can unplug from the invasion into our space and plug into the real power in silence. That's right. Fifteen minutes of silence seeking God's voice generates more power than every digital tool you have. It might be challenging at first but an unplugged walk or pause any place with more things God made than man made will plug us into a God connection. Our mind clears of other's thoughts. Our thinking clears of what others might think of us. We get out of the business of telling God we can't hear him and find him waiting for us in 15 minutes of unplugged time. How to start? It's a pretty cool thought that the HOW is already written down for us: Philipians 4:8 tells us to put our minds on whatever is true, just, honest, pure, things that are good. Silence generates faith. People recognize the power of integrity. And that has real power. Real power generates faith. It looks like this: One person plugs in and says "that's terrible but what can I do?" another plugs in and says "wow! I can hardly wait to see what God does with this." Peace and Light, my friends.