Delete the news app tonight

There is real trouble in the world, and some of it is yours to carry. The rest got handed to you by a feed built to keep you scrolling, and you have been paying for it with sleep, patience, and the attention your people needed.

Watch yourself tomorrow morning. Thumb moving before your feet hit the floor. Forty minutes of famine, collapse, outrage, and a car crash in a city you will never visit. Then you walk into your kitchen wound tight and short with whoever says good morning first. The dread does not stay in the phone. It leaks into the people standing in front of you, and they never find out why you were sharp.

Here is the test. Can you do anything about it in the next week? If yes, do that thing. Vote, give, call, show up. If no, you are not being informed. You are being fed. Being aware of a tragedy you cannot touch is not virtue, it is just a weight you picked up to prove you care. Your neighbor's broken fence is yours. The thing trending at midnight is not.

The hours do not disappear, they transfer. Cut the scrolling and something fills the gap. Make it something with a body attached. A walk. A phone call to someone who will answer. Sitting on the porch with nothing in your hands and no plan, which will feel strange for about four minutes and then feel like rest.

Delete the news app from your phone tonight before you sleep, and check the news once tomorrow from a browser.

Scripture does not tell you to ignore suffering. It tells you where your assignment is. Each day has enough trouble of its own sits at the end of a passage about worry, right after the line about not adding a single hour to your life by being anxious. Matthew 6:34. The trouble in front of you today is enough for one man. Tomorrow comes with its own, and grace comes with it. What that feed hands you is trouble with no assignment attached, nothing to do and nowhere to put it. You were not built to carry grief you cannot act on. Carry what is in reach. Hand the rest back.