Sensible Seasoned With Suspicion Thinking

I confess, I am guilty. I have fallen repeatedly into the trap of allowing media to emotionally charge my batteries. At the end of August I set a goal of being calm for the next twelve months, and all I had to do was turn on my phone and go to social media, to get assaulted in the eyeballs with very strange and disconcerting events, happening no where near me, to people I have never met, to get my emotional juices flowing. And that, is the point of social media, and always has been, namely: capture the attention of the masses by visually telling them a story, and then yank them this way and that by the invisible nose ring, that has been inserted during commercial breaks. 

Can you see the dummy drool dripping from chins as they watch endless streams of manipulative media, mesmerized and frozen in place, dear one? Have you had to wipe your own chin, give your head a shake, and tell yourself, Snap out of it, go do something productive, for goodness sakes! Have you ever deemed it necessary to go on a social media sabbatical, as though media had become your full time job and you needed a vacation, or had to enforce a similar ban for your child or children? 

I was listening to a sermon the other day and the preacher repeatedly commanded, Read books. He said it so many times that I felt a little remiss. I do read, in the mornings, but later in the day, when I am not gainfully employed, spending time with friends, exercising, or taking care of household tasks, I give myself permission to coast along a stream of nothingness, where my mind is not firing with sparks of intellect, stimulating my thinking, because it is preoccupied with the nonsensical stuff of media mania. Brain flatlining is a real phenomena: all we have to do is turn on our phones and go to any number of "channels" to have devilish things move into our psyches and souls, taking over like leaches, sucking us dry of deductive reasoning and sensible seasoned with suspicion thinking. Fight or flight is confused now in most people ... pass a troop of university aged young adults as they wait for a bus, necks bent, palms open as they gaze and scroll for perhaps the thousandth time that day, through their many media applications: Would they jump back in time if the bus they await, happened to hop the curb, or would they all be flattened, because they had no awareness of their surroundings, being so absorbed in the nothingness of their phones? 

Thinking of this scene, and knowing that I too, have been captured and released, captured and released, from this prison cell of emptiness by being sucked into my phone and having my emotions toyed with, has me experiencing a sense of loss, coupled with a critical analysis calm. The calm, it must be embraced, dear one. We must be even keel, cool as cucumbers, sensible in our assessments ... we must read books. I clearly, am speaking to you, and of course, to myself. 

I think of the apostle Paul, and Jesus standing next to him while he is in the custody of Roman soldiers in Jerusalem, after an enraged crowd attempted to rip him limb from limb following the hearing of his salvation testimony: Jesus spoke these words:

Be of good cheer, Paul: for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also in Rome (Acts 23:11)

The apostle Paul modelled himself after Jesus. Jesus lived his divine plan while he walked the earth. He came to heal the sick, give sight to the blind, deliver the demon occupied from their enslavement, and raise the dead, without fussing or fighting with the powers that be, because he stated: 

John 16:33

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. 

Dear reader, some will be saved after hearing the gospel, but the majority will not experience salvation in this lifetime or in eternity. A person can call themself a Christian, but there must be evidence, fruit, or olives on that tree of faith, in order for them to be believed. Paying lip service does not a Christian make ... 

Paul willingly walked to his own persecution and death. He knew what to expect and was willing to pay with his life to speak Truth to ears that would hear. Not everyone will hear, heed, and live for Christ and Christ alone, and that, is what a believer must accept as a cold hard fact. In this acceptance, in my present acceptance of this reality, I will try my best to stay as cool as a cucumber, while I speak gospel truth, and pray that those that hear of Jesus as Saviour, will turn their backs on the world of sin, and walk toward, the kingdom of God.  

May the peace of Christ be with you all the days of your life, dear one. 

NOTE: TV, short for television = tell-a-vision. The best way to capture and enslave a mind, is to tell a distorted, godless, hateful vision, to irk, irritate, and enrage viewers, while they sit and absorb whatever fresh hell wicked people pour in as poison into their minds, hearts, and souls. That, dear one, is social media at its very best, inflicting its very worst, on humanity.