I like to stay informed about what’s going on in the world, but I don’t enjoy watching or reading stories from most news outlets. The news usually has a negative and opinionated slant to it and often pits two factions against each other or talks negatively about an individual or a group. This creates a lot of anger and tension. Life is too short to get stressed out and angry all the time.
There are many positive stories out there, but those stories aren’t interesting enough and don’t help improve ratings. We also live in a culture that likes sensationalism and gossip. People like to throw fuel on fires and make small negative isolated events global catastrophes. Sometimes I wonder if people would have anything to talk about if they weren’t trying to find the negative in everyone and everything. It’s a lot easier to tear people down than to lift them up.
The Devil’s best strategy is to divide and scatter. He wants people to fight among themselves and be angry and fearful. Yoda, from the movie Star Wars, was onto something when he talked about fear, anger, and hate being paths to the dark side. God invites us all to enter into His love for all eternity and the Devil wants to scatter, separate, and distract us so we will have a harder time succeeding in our goal to get to Heaven. Satan wants us to focus on things that don’t matter and fill our lives with meaningless fluff.
Jesus says, “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” Although Satan enjoys dividing us, he’s not divided on his goal to take as many souls from God as possible. Therefore, we cannot be divided within our Church, within our family, or within our hearts. We have to be sure of our love for God and strong in our relationship with Him because Satan will show us many other things to love that seem more enticing.
Our main goals in life should be improving our relationship with God so we can know and love Him more and also strive to love our neighbor as ourselves. This world would be a lot different if we started treating every person as a loved one. We can bring unity to this world if we can learn to focus more on making others happy and less on making ourselves happy. True love involves sacrifice, but that sacrifice will bring us eternal joy.
