I'm off from preaching this holiday weekend, and the first thing I did was work a few hours. Oops.

I did spend a lot of time quilting, which feeds my soul.

-Liz

Tips for Self Care

There are so many things that we say are at the heart of christianity, forgiveness, salvation, certainly love and perhaps kindness. Righteousness. Justice.

So I was somewhat surprised to find that Acts 1:3 the writer notes that in the resurrected Jesus’ forty days on earth he taught them about: the Kingdom of God. No other topics mentioned.

What would it mean to our message and our outreach and our care of each other if we thought that the Kingdom of God was our primary concern? For one, I’d have to spend a lot less time panicking about what is happening, and a lot more time imagining, and acting, to make the world that should be.

One thing that is keeping me from good work in the world is that I spend too much time keeping up with the news. And the time I spent learning what is happening wears me out before I even start the work.

So with the coming Kingdom on my mind, I have suggestions for balancing the fact that we need to know what is happening so we can resist, but we must not overwhelm ourselves to in-action. We need to learn some, we cannot learn it all.

Here are some tips I’ve learned.

1. Few things are immediate. If every three days I read the news, I’ll know just as much as if I read it every day. It’s possible you could go five days. The other thing that happens when you don’t read a story right away is the later coverage has more depth and more background explanations. Often a later story has corrections.
2. Some things are immediate—especially events happening in nearby towns and events that require a quick response. We kept a Jan 6 terrorist from having a public meeting at a local space by noticing, and acting, quickly. One strategy is for you and three to five friends to take turns on what days you check on the news so that you can inform the others.
3. Choose a single topic to be your focus. Trust that someone else is focusing on the other topics. I read about poverty. (Well, and immigration.)
4. Choose a few resources to read. You don’t have to read every article about the same event. I read headlines and choose one article to get details. I try to read one long-form analysis each week.
5. (I subscribe to many reputable news sources because they need my money to be able to keep reporting. That doesn’t mean I have to read all they send me.)
6. Find one source that gives you hope. I’m a big fan of Robert Reich’s “Reasons for limited optimism” which describes some of the places that our checks and balances have worked.
7. Pay attention to your gatherings with friends. If they frequently turn into a long thread of doom stories, find out if they’d agree to a limit on that discussion. For example, if after 10 minutes you aren’t moving on to strategies for action, consider dropping the topic. Some venting is good, but too much can add to our sense that there is no hope.
8. Read and watch fun things. Watch a dumb TV series. Read a funny novel or a mystery. Listen to podcasts that are interesting and not related, or only tangentially related, to the current place we are now.

To be clear, I don't always follow my own good advice!

God really wants us to have joyful, hopeful lives. We, that is human beings, do a lot to make that difficult. I believe it is our responsibility to be knowledgable and to act to protect our neighbors. We must balance that with caring for our own mental health.

What is our favorite way to take a break from the news? Reply to this email to let me know. ​
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This Guardian article on "hyper-normalization" is important. It is surreal to engage in ordinary life decisions (should I get bangs or not for my next hair cut and the like) when the world is falling apart around us. There is significant research on how people in the Soviet Union have struggled with this. The article offers tips on how to both feel okay about getting your hair cut, and also make choices to resist the fall of democracy.

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This article got me started on this idea. Is watching the news bad for your mental health?

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