My sister and I were talking yesterday about turning off the news. We both, independently, have walked away from mainstream media: my sister, the liberal, and me, the conservative.
We have both discovered that the media (and for me, social media, which she doesn’t “do”) causes too much stress and strife in our lives. It incites anger, putting people on “sides” then placing them in opposition. It highlights the negative. Heck, when I was a journalist, the mantra “if it bleeds, it leads” was held dearly to editors’ hearts…and it’s even worse today.
All news and social media boils down to two creating two responses:
ANGER and ANXIETY.
But Jesus calls us to His peace. To find serenity in our lives. To live in peace with one another.
It is hard to talk about such things without sounding naïve. The world feels ugly, with pervasive violence and cruelty no longer existing as exceptions, but flowing as a steady stream of function. To speak of peace in such moments can feel indulgent, even irresponsible, as though calm itself were some sort of ineptitude on our parts.
Yet Jesus never treated serenity as a luxury reserved for stable times. Jesus lived in a world no less combustible than our own. Roman occupation and political brutality shaped every aspect of Jewish life. Poverty was widespread and disease prevailed. Religious leaders focused on appearance over substance. Nothing about that landscape suggested tranquility.
Still, Jesus repeatedly drew attention to the smallest details of ordinary life: birds fed without worry, lilies growing with glorious abandon, and bread broken in meals shared in the company of friends. These were not sentimental images. They were theological claims. God, Jesus insisted, was present not only in acts of deliverance, but in the quiet maintenance of life itself.
This insistence matters in our daily lives. We are surrounded by the assumption that constant anger and anxiety are the appropriate responses to a burning world. Awareness has become synonymous with outrage, while peace is often mistaken for disengagement.
But Christian serenity is neither denial nor retreat. It is a refusal to let chaos direct our response.
“Do not worry about tomorrow,” Jesus says, not because tomorrow will be easy, but because worry cannot add meaning or clarity to today. Serenity, in this sense, is not an emotional state but a discipline; an ongoing decision to locate one’s trust somewhere deeper than the news cycle, deeper than fear and anger, deeper even than one’s own sense of control.
The small things become essential. A shared meal. The laughter of children. The warmth of sunlight across a floor. These moments do not solve global crises, but they do something equally necessary: they remind us that goodness continues to exist at human scale.
The world may indeed be burning, and I say, let it. It has always burned, hasn’t it? Scripture never denies the reality of a world on fire. But it also insists that resurrection is not a metaphor: it has already entered the story.
And because of that, serenity is not a betrayal of suffering, but a testimony of hope.