January 7th

Looking for good news

To my dear TFMC family,

It didn’t take all that long, to be honest, for the relaxed feelings that things are all going to be OK to vanish, as a new wave of bad news came flooding through my news feed.  You would think that bad news would take a break over the Christmas holidays, but it doesn’t.  7 days into the new year, we’ve heard about the military incursion by the US into Venezuela, the threats to annex another sovereign country, Greenland, and, as of a few hours ago, the shooting and death of a civilian by ICE agents in Minnesota.  It’s only been 7 days into the New Year.

On January 1st, as I celebrated with my in-laws, they asked me what my resolution would be for the new year.  I muttered something about spending more quality time with the family instead of looking at my screen in my hand.  That is still true to some extent, but I think it needs to be revised.  The reality is, I read too much news, and it affects me.  

Fortuitously, as I was driving the other day, CBC was interviewing Angus Hervy, the editor of Fix the News, about the good news we might have overlooked.  And it struck me that most, if not all, the news I read is ‘bad news,’ insofar as it’s news about things gone wrong, horrible things, miserable things, tragic things, troublesome and worrisome things and largely, things that I’m powerless and helpless to change.  Rarely was there anything uplifting in the regular news cycle.  I need to engage less with this “misery machine,” as one author wrote.  I need to engage with less ‘brain rot’ of what’s published.  The trouble is, I still want to know what’s going on.

This CBC interview piqued my interest, and after reading the year-end summary from Fix the News, I was struck by how much good news is out there, but it barely got a byline.  And this made me see something.  If I don’t look for the good news, I’m not going to see it.  So that’s going to be my New Year’s resolution, to try and look for the good news all around us.

And I realize that this can have a double meaning, and I’m good with that.  The first, obvious meaning, is to look for the literal good news, rather than the bad news.  The second is to be on the lookout for the Good News, signs of God’s presence in the world.  The post-Christmas season is a season for looking for the Good News around us, seeking out little Epiphanies.  Anna and Simeon, in our scripture reading on Sunday, were on the lookout for the Good News of God’s presence.  And, in looking for, they found Jesus.

“Seek and ye shall find,” Jesus says to his listeners.  So, I’m going to work at doing a better job of looking, looking for both the good news and the Good News in the year ahead.  That’s my New Year’s resolution, what’s yours?

Yours,

Craig Janzen Neufeld, Pastor