There, There

 Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings. (I Peter 5:8-9)

          Two words into this passage, and I’m in trouble already. Be alert? Really? Do I have to? It seems to me that everything around me is screaming “Be alert!” Oh no! COVID-19, the Delta variants, what the Left is doing, what the Right is doing, what everyone else is doing all over the world, 24/7. There is no end to the calls for alertness. They are, I think, a clever ploy because we come to the point of crisis fatigue. Like the story of the little boy who cried “Wolf!” we “townfolk” get so tired of running hither and thither to face the crisis that when an actual crisis comes, we’re snoozing and can’t be bothered. The real problems get hidden among the myriad of ersatz-crises.

          I would like to be alert. I would like to keep up with the events and the issues of the day, but I don’t have a staff to sift through the chaff for me. News reporters should be doing this, but they’re too busy waxing eloquent about the chaff. I’m not sure it matters, because I suspect when it comes to the stuff that actually matters, I’m no better about being alert. I don’t want to be alert. It takes too much time and energy to be alert. I even cook in bulk so I don’t have to think about what to eat for dinner each day.

          Every now and again, I wake up to some emotional fact. I might be depressed, anxious, impatient, or even filled with self-loathing, but I realize suddenly that I have been operating in that funk for some time before I noticed it was even there. It’s a lot easier to escape the clutches of an octopus before it has one tentacle on you than when it has all eight wrapped around you. This is part of why I aske people to pray about my attitude. But the problem there is hypochondria. It does little good to take every twinge, every thought, ever feeling as an indication of some horrible spiritual or emotional illness.

          And that is why we need to be alert and of sober mind. The rest of the passage makes it clear that the danger is real, and in our age of information overload, we need to learn to detach and to prioritize so that we can be alert and of sober mind. I suspect there are things that are keeping me from doing what I know I should, and one of them is the idea that I have to do all of them. And then I get up in the morning and instead of working on the things that I should, I get distracted by things that don’t matter so much. But… “They’re there!” And now my mind perks  up and tells me that to those things, I need to say, “There, there… I’ll get back to you if time allows.” Right now, there are more important things that need my attention, like what God has to say.