Jollyblogger with some great perspective:

Americans today are safer, more prosperous, and healthier than at any time in history. Yet the news media continues to stoke and promote our fears because fear and sensationalism garners viewers.

. . .

I think those who share my conservative Christian worldview, should be the least alarmed and the least sucked in to this stuff of anyone, yet we are often the ones who are the most sucked in. But, Jesus Himself said that the era that is bracketed by His first and second comings would be an era when wheat and tares grow up together. Believers and unbelievers will increase in number. Good and evil will increase. Disaster and restoration will grow together.

In his best selling book "The Reason for God," Tim Keler points out that both the religious and secular are increasingly alarmed at the growth of the other side. Keller points out that both have evidence on their side - secularism is increasing and so is belief. This is just one example of the working out of the parable of the wheats and tares in our day. But it is also illustrative of a couple of basic theological truths - fall and redemption. We live in a fallen world, thus the world will always have evil and disaster, both natural and man-made. But we live in a world where a redeemer has come, thus the world will always contain remarkable healing and beauty.

This means we can and should take appropriate action when disaster and evil show up. But we should never be alarmed or surprised them and we especially ought not to live in fear. And most importantly, we must not let the presense of disaster and evil obscure the beauty and grandeur that is life on this earth.

Unfortunately the news media is well equipped to bring you disaster and evil on a daily basis, and in regards to beauty and goodness, not so much.

Read the whole thing. it's good.

I grow increasingly tired of the alarms constantly ringing in our media culture. And not because I'm a fan of sticking my head in the sand. But because, as Jollyblogger points out, bad news and sensationalism sells. And, I'd add, the human race has misplaced confidence in and fear about the control we think we have over the course of history.

When it comes to the church, i thought the portion above on the wheat and tares was particularly good. Jesus' parable-warnings about the tares that would grow up in the church are an answer to the scary human tendency to generalize and lump, and also a calming influence on our other scary tendency to panic and run. We wonder why our churches aren't all they can be. We wonder why sometimes Christian people do bad things. There's a temptation to throw up hands and bail. But in reading the New Testament, another question presents itself to me. Why are we surprised? It's all laid out for us. Jesus told us what to expect. And in Acts, through the Epistles to the Apocalypse we see the infant church, in all her young glory and with all her faults, redeemed, rebuked, beloved, honored, changing into the image of Christ from glory to glory, moving toward the Harvest at the end of the age where God will carefully separate every tare from every wheat stalk, because He knows the ones that are His. In the meantime, imperfect and sinful believers march the awkward march of sanctification, and the tares march alongside, remarkably wheat-like in appearance but tragically unfruitful in reality. We march with a mission, to bring goodness, beauty, redemption, the Kingdom to a world in desperate need. That God would choose to use the likes of us for this is astonishing.

There is no greater privilege in my life than to be a part of the Body of Christ.