A Reminder Not to Let Worry Steal Your Time

Ladies do you remember when Christ told his disciples they could not change anything by worrying? Well, I found out it is true.  Now that I can look at history, I see there is always going to be some kind of fear or worry produced by the world, which usually does not happen. Getting you to worry produces a kind of reaction: what you buy, how you spend your time, where you live, etc. 

 About 40 years ago I remember a constant story on the news about the safest, healthiest place to live.  Young people were breaking the hearts of their own kin, leaving their parents and grandparents to go to utopia.  That news was broadcast to mobilize the youth and change the dynamics of the population.  It separated generations of families that were interdependent and edified one another.  Many old people lost the one thing they loved the most. The youth suffered too, as they lived without their grandparents.

Today the housewife is terrorized by the news. There is going to be a shortage of something. Remember the rice shortage? Remember Y2K when everything was supposed to break down? Whatever happened to the other scares, where people were supposed to leave their houses and go to a big gathering center? Remember the scare about living near the ocean with all the poison gas? People left their homes and fled into the mountains where yet another "disaster" awaited them.

If you are raising children, your moods and your tension may be very detrimental to their sense of well being. They deserve to feel safe and have a happy, carefree childhood. You need to focus on them and your home. If you feel you have to have news, make your family and your life your news.  We used to write our own newspapers with home headlines cartoons, photographs, stories, weather and seasonal information, things to do, menus for the week, and good news of things being accomplished.  

When you decide to quit following the news, your friends will accuse you of living in a bubble. I say you should make your home a bubble and live in a different world. The home is like Noah's Ark, made as a shelter from the rain and wind and storm. Keeping the upheaval of the world outside is what makes the ship a place of refuge.  If you let the winds and the waves inside the ship, it is no longer a refuge.  I would suggest keeping it all out. Your home is a place where you can enjoy your family without the world's help. When Grandparents come, turn off all outside distractions and concentrate on your love for each other. This is your current event. This is your history in the making. This is your spiritual development, and your education.

With the Ark plan, you will soon understand how you don't need the upsetting news in your children's lives. I have learned it is  all obsolete information by the time the children are grown. It will not have any relevance, and you will have wasted a lot of time worrying about it.  

General Douglas MacArthur said, 

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."

Such news was designed to change the way people live, to undo their contentment and make them feel insecure. A friend said, "For myself, I wish I had not known half the worrisome stuff on the news. My children never knew me as a happy, relaxed mother in her element of home and marriage."

When you read the old fable called "The Sky is Falling" about Chicken Little who was afraid of everything, you will realize the-sky-is-falling technique has gone on in every generation to keep people in fear.  Later, they learned that many of the broadcasts they heard were manufactured by the news media and could not be proven, but the reports did their intended damage: to make people feel insecure and to keep them in a perpetual state of anxiety. Many people left their countries and their homes, to move to better places, only to be followed by the same terrorizing news. 

I grew up with parents who were born in the 1920's and they regarded all the fearful news with skepticism, and went on with their own personal interests.  I was talking to one of my friends about this, and she said, "The best thing we can do to alleviate all this fearful news is to start writing our own news." We could also write stories about real life, where  the good people actually accomplished their goals, invented things, and made towns prettier.  

What is so debilitating about the news is how it replays in your mind and controls your thoughts, robbing you of your concentration on your children, parents and family members who love you and need you.  

Ladies you do not have to add worry about the world while your children are young. You can create a world of love for them in your own home. Have you ever wanted to be in a different era, a beautiful era and a more gentle time? You can have that in your world at home.