The Best Kind of News

Last updated on: June 26, 2016 at 9:40 am by Anne Kennedy

The Best Kind of News 2016-06-26T09:40:11-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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It might be hard to believe this, but it’s been strangely restful over the last week not to be able to keep up my usual devoted attention to what’s going on in the world. Indeed, it was alarming, whichever day it was, to wake up, read that Britain was going to leave the EU, throw everything in the car, begin to drive, learn nothing more about it, and carry on breathing through the rest of the day. My appalling ignorance did not affect international markets, nor the outcome of anybody’s vote. Furthermore, each day’s news cycle passed me by and instead of beating back discouragement and outrage–which is what a news cycle is meant to induce–I glided ever higher up towards Mt. Shasta, listening to a James Harriet book and considering the beauty of this incredible continent. My mother, unable to contain herself, sang America the Beautiful and made all the children listen to her.

My knowing about the news of the day doesn’t impact anything at all. The level of outrage that I do or do not lather up has no bearing on anything one way or another. But somehow, the way that news is propelled out into all the world, the way that Twitter flaps and cries, the insistent voice of the news caster, communicates that if you don’t stay on for this next segment or read this next article, the whole world will come a tumbling down, and you wouldn’t want that would you? So you read just a little more, or watch until the next commercial break.

And me, I get tired of the forced outrage. Brexit could have been the end of the world, but it looks like we all woke up the next morning. So something else must be going to precipitate the End of Everything.

But where the absence of knowledge of world events has been a rest, the shortness of each visit has been a bitter pill. I sat with my grandfather for a few minutes in the cool twilight, waiting for a single star to beat its way past the bright lights of Southern California, and felt deeply sorry that I know so little about his life–his accomplishments, his motivations, the things that happened to him and my grandmother. When you’ve collapsed in someone’s living room after a long drive, you’re apt to talk about the weather, or what happened last week, and there just isn’t time to delve into what happened fifty years ago.

It’s because in the deepest recesses of my broken mind, I’m essentially a gossip. I want to hear the News, the scandals, whenever they happened. Somehow knowing about something makes me feel like I’m in the thick of it, I played some part.

And it should be like that with the gospel, I think, just a little. It’s not a News Cycle, it’s just Good News. For the person who loves to pass on or receive a tidbit, going round telling people about Jesus should be thrilling. Except, of course, that it isn’t. It’s a terrifying proposition. It’s liable to embarrass us all. It’s exactly the kind of “news” calculated to shut down everybody’s good time.

Still, it’s the only kind of news where the far flung hearer can really be caught up and brought into the events themselves. When you tell someone a snatch of the gospel, you’re not relaying some curio from the past, you’re not just passing on information. It’s not something that happened back there and it’s so interesting to know about it, but later, when you’re sipping your evening Ovaltine and counting the tins in your cupboard, you’ll completely forget and go on to think about something else. It’s the one kind of News that once you know about it, you really can be right there in the middle of the fray–the enchanting place where true knowledge produces something delectable. You know Jesus, and you are caught up in his life forever.

Have a lovely Sunday.

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