Yet God was still on the throne then. That's right. He's still on the throne now. Do I believe that? Yes. Is he trustworthy? Can I rely on him? And I'll let the Holy Spirit then remind me of that. Yes. Hello there. You're listening to The Girl Talk Podcast. My name is Carol. I'm Kelly. I'm Chisha. And we're glad you've joined us today. How in the world do you live in the world? How do you live in this fear driven anxiety-inducing world as a believer? That's what we're going to talk about today. And how anxiety isn't a failure faith necessarily, but how do you stay informed without spiraling at a control? There's so much crazy going on right now. Sure. And it feels like there's so much more crazy today than there was six months ago than there was a year ago than there was even during COVID, which I thought was like the craziest time ever. But I felt like today we thought we had peaked. We did not peak. I want to start talking about or start the discussion with talking about your news diet. I had never kind of heard this phrase until I subscribe to a news source that I think we've mentioned it here before called the pour over, and they they summarize the headlines and give you kind of a biblical world view of what's going on just the facts, no commentary at all. And they first brought this idea before me called a news diet. And I want us to kind of look at that because I think that has a lot to do with how we respond to what it is we see. What's a news diet? News diet is just the same as you are like tracking your eating habits, if you're writing down everything that you eat in a day, make a note or either in your phone or a mental note, I find that it helps you write it down the times per day that you check in on the news. See what your news diet is. If your news diet consists of only one news source for multiple minutes, hours, days, maybe that's unbalanced, just like you wouldn't eat candy every day, and that's all you eat, right? Or even just protein diet or just protein, just it wouldn't be a balanced diet. And so I think one of the things that if we can start seeing our news intake as a diet and how we're spending those minutes that we have per day or taking in of news and educating ourselves really, the awareness I think is the first step because a lot of people don't realize just the impact that the news has on them, right? There is one show in particular that I can turn on and my blood pressure can go from perfectly fine to terrible stroke likes, you know, readings, just just turning that program on. I don't even have to watch it or engage with it or anything. If I just walk past a TV and it's on, it automatically makes my blood pressure go up. And so I think being aware of that right out of the gate kind of helps things. So if you sit down and say, okay, in this course of this day, how much, how much news did I, how much did news impact my daily life? I think it's also important when we're talking about news, we're using the word news, but that for me, I also means podcasts that are centered toward cultural things and what's happening. Even on a spiritual level things, that is also part of this diet. I think and the awareness of it that we need to keep in mind. And I love that you touched on that because I think as believers, we can, and I mentioned this a little earlier, but we can only focus on one particular source. And I don't think that's necessarily healthy all the time either. I think we need to vary our diet, just like we would, you know, you want to eat plenty of green stuff. You want to have all the colors on your plate, right? You want to have each each category, not so much that you can change your viewpoint, although that might happen, but I think so that you can get a balanced view of what's going on, right? Yeah. I do that with my podcast. So I have, I listened to a bunch of different podcasts, and especially when I'm in the car. And I listened to one that is Christian news. So World News, World News Group has a great podcast, if you like to listen to your news instead of read it. They have a great one. And then I listened to three secular ones. One is a conservative news outlet that is run by believers, but not Christian, right? I mean, not a Christian news source, they have podcasts. And then the other two are very not conservative. And my blood pressure fluctuates depending on the thing, but I do find it to be helpful to listen to all of that, even if I don't like it. Okay. Let's helpful. Let's talk about that just for a minute. What benefits have you seen by balancing your intake of what your core beliefs as a believer? What is the benefit of having those other sources that aren't technically Christian? How has that benefited you? Yeah, great. That's a great question because as a person, it actually doesn't feel like it's benefiting me. I tremendous amount. Sure. However, it does help me, I think, understand the people better. It helps me understand, because I desperately want to understand the lost world. I definitely want to understand people who have different perspectives than I have. Because it's easy for me to go, y'all are just crazy, y'all are wrong and you're crazy. But I want to slip into that world enough to be able to try to understand so that I can try to, so that I can talk about Jesus, I can talk about my own beliefs, I can talk about my own view on politics or on the news from a perspective that's not one-sided. Yeah. And I love that you pointed to this being well informed about all the things. Here's the deal. I think that both conservative and liberal, one of the things that our culture is in the midst of right now is a crisis because too many people are only listening to one viewpoint. Right. And they think that if you don't agree with their viewpoint, be it conservative or liberal or somewhere in the middle, if you don't agree with that, then you're an enemy. And I think that's one of the things that has happened with the rise of social media is that we turn up the voices that we want to listen to and turn down the voices of anyone else and there becomes this, this is my enemy kind of mentality instead of balancing what we intake so that we can have a more informed view. Right. And know how to relate to people who don't believe the same way that we do. Right. And it really hasn't in many ways changed my opinion, like I haven't changed my beliefs on things. But I do have more compassion for other people because I understand where they're coming from a little bit better. Yeah. And the fact that you are willing to try to understand that, I think, is very. Some days it's hard. Oh my gosh. I will be real. It is hard. I understand. Yeah. So I like my bubble. Yeah. So I think we want to look at our diet, number one, be aware. What did you initially, did you make that decision? How did you come about deciding, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to balance this out and get from new new sources. Or is that something you've always done? No, it's not something I've always done. It's really because the world got more crazy. And I started seeing my friends who are, I'm conservative and I started seeing my friends who are not conservative, having very animated and very, very deep passionate opinions about things that I had a very different take on. And so. But they're good people. And there. I mean, some of them are believers. And so I wanted very much to be able to go, "Okay, I want to understand you better." And it's not always practical to be able to meet with them face-to-face. I do, there's times, I do that anyway. But I wanted to be able to understand where they were coming from before I even did that. Yeah. What is it that you're listening to? Who's talking in your ear? I know who's talking in my ear. So who's talking in your ear that's making you feel this way? And so it was really so that I could understand the people that were driving me crazy with the things that were posted on social media so that I could understand them better. Yeah. Yeah. Because I didn't want to not like them. Right. You know, I wanted to be able to have conversations and not come to it from a place of frustration and anger. Yeah. That's good. Trisha, what about you? Have you found yourself being able to balance that thing? Well, I tell you what I had to do recently is make a different kind of a change in my news diet because I was having a lot of anxiety. I was having a lot of anxiety and thinking about the end of the world, I mean, really thinking about, you know, in times and, you know, you're speaking more to prophecy and that kind of thing. Prophecy and all that stuff. And so then I'm listening to a podcast talking about that and then I'm watching the news in whatever source and thinking about that as it related to that. And so I would, I found myself just spinning and spinning and to use the analogy of a news diet took me a long time to digest what I was taking in, right? And it was leaving me with a lot of anxiety. And I talked to my therapist about it and he said, well, you know, how, how much time are You're spending listening to podcasts or these.
sorts of things. And he said, I think you need to take a break. And so I've made the choice recently to just kind of pull back a little bit. And I think there are seasons. There are seasons when we want to interact with people and want to be informed to have conversations. But there are also seasons when you identify, hey, this is not the right time for me to have so much of this on my mind all the time. So I've stepped back from that. So I think I love that you are, that there are two kind of separate opinions here about how you can customize your experience. Because just as in the same way that we would tell someone who struggles with alcohol, let's just use that for instance, if somebody struggles with alcohol, you're not going to want to meet at a bar for dinner. You're just not going to want to do that. Good idea. And when you realize those limits are something that you need, those boundaries. So how do you, as an individual who, by your own admission, struggled with the anxiety of world events? How do you stay informed without going down that, that rabbit hole of like, yeah, fatalistic kind of thinking? Well, you mentioned my number one new source at the beginning, which is the pourover. Because it does tell you a brief and funny, a witty snapshot of what's happening. And it's not biased. I wouldn't say any way. It basically says the facts. And then it has the biblical perspective and it has a verse and a way that we can pray about each of the things. And so I have really leaned into that. So I can, because I'll hear something on the news, maybe I'll walk by and I'll hear a headline and I'm like, oh, I want to know what that is. So then I'll check the pourover source to see the story behind it. And that gives it to me. And sometimes when I'm on air and sometimes when I'm wondering about something, I'll check news. And I will check, I will check three different sources. So I guess in that way, I am doing that. I'm not just going to the one favorite source. I'm going to about two or three different sources. So I do that, but I don't camp out there. And I think the real difference has been when I'm in my car, I used to listen to podcasts anywhere I went. I'd be like, okay, I'd either listen to the light or I would listen to a podcast. And it would typically be one geared toward the cultural events that are happening. And maybe the biblical relevance of that geared toward end times. I find myself interested in that. Yeah. And then by the time I got to the destination, I'd be like this, but now I'm making the choice to turn things off and sit in silence and drive in silence sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes. And it's a nervous system reset. I was just going to mention that to kind of reset yourself, we are overly stimulated. No matter what our struggle is, I mean, it is hard to focus. I think with the latest statistics, we have an 11 second. It's eight seconds. I think the reset is so good. And that is something that Jesus did. Yeah. You know, we often hear in scripture, he tore himself away from the crowds and went to a quiet place or a lonely place, a place where he could be quiet and talked to his father. And I think that's one of the things I want to get back to with the diet because I think if your news intake is vastly greater than your scripture intake, that might be where you start with the imbalance there. Because that's one of the things that that I've been convicted in a big way, not necessarily because of news, but because of anything that you allow. You know, everything is my, I tell you when I noticed this, my mom was in an assisted living. And for a time before she passed and I would go into the assisted living to visit her. And as I walked down the hallway, you could tell what political party every person was in that place because more times than not, they were hard of hearing or could not hear at all. And so they had the volume on 28. So it just was a catastrophe of sounds when you went in. But you could hear how passionate people were on this news station. And then you walked past another room and it'd be a different news station to be, you know, it just, and it was a good like lesson for me. I was like, wow, that not so much the heart of hearing, but I think we become hard of hearing when we turn up one new source too much. Scripture doesn't do that way. When we turn up scripture, it sheds light on everything else, right? And so I think that one of those things that God has been really peeling away the layers with in my life is just everything that I take in, everything that I consume in my senses. They all have an impact on me. Yeah, yeah. And I think one of the other things that we have to take into consideration to is what we filter it through. Like that we might, you know, for me, I have a very robust diet of news because I want to listen to all four of those podcasts as often as I can. But I've got to filter all of that through scripture. I've got to filter all of that through the Holy Spirit. So even more so for me, it's having, it's taking it all in, but then taking it all to the Father and saying, um, I, whoa, okay, I need some help process on all of this. What, where are you at work? Show me where you're at work. Help me understand what this is that's going on, not from a way that's going to, you know, make me feel like I'm more anxious, you know, don't, don't, don't reveal how this plays in the end times necessarily, but reveal how this plays into your big master plan. Like you, if I trust God, which I do, if I really put my faith in trust in him, I understand that he's got a big master plan that he's working out and that all of these news things are part of that. Right. And that there's been times in the world where things felt like they were absolutely going to hell in a hand basket. And yet God was still on the throne then. That's right. Do I believe that? Yeah. Is he trustworthy? Can I, can I rely on him? And I let the Holy Spirit then remind me of that. Yes. And help me process all the news to go, oh, yeah, this is crazy over there. I ran everything is going on. That's super crazy. But they're not Donald Trump in on the throne. Yeah. The I told of Iran's not on the throne. Right. Jesus is on the throne. And he's got it all under control. And it's going to be okay. Whatever it is, even if the world does go to hell in a hand basket, it is, it's going to be okay because God's still good. Yeah. And here's the other thing I want us to just touch on briefly because news has changed. Oh, yeah. So much. Yeah. And even my lifetime. And everything that we see is designed to evoke some type of emotion in us. And I think it's important to say this because you know, I shared it at the moment at the beginning. There's a TV show. And they come on and they talk about current events. And they automatically makes my blood pressure go crazy. It's like the weirdest thing. But it's because they were designed to evoke that emotion in you. And so when you feel an emotional reaction to something that you see, whether it be a news source you agree with or don't, whichever feelings are not a bad thing. But it's what you do with those feelings. And I think that's another area where our culture is just gone crazy. And everybody thinks, if you feel badly towards someone, if you don't agree with their standpoint, that means they're your enemy. Once again, leading us to that fatalistic, if you disagree with me, we're enemies. And that's just not what the United States is. You know, we've always been able to have healthy conversations about things. But I think it's because news has changed and everything's breaking news now. Everything. Yes. You know, you hear the little, the little sounders that they have now. And you automatically look at the TV and you're like, okay, what's what's happened? I think something's happened in the news. They're all designed to get an emotional reaction from us because we're emotional creatures. And so that's what sells. And that's what sells. That's what ratings go up, you know. And that's what keeps our eyes glued to the right. That's right. That leads at leads. Yeah. I think they said. Oh, that's yeah. I've never heard that before. Yeah. So how do we honor God with what we watch and what we intake as far as current events and news goes, how do we do that? What would you say or some some practical ways that we can kind of put tennis shoes on this and make it work in our real lives? Well, I think part of it, and we've already talked about this, but I think part of it is really having that balance diet of different news sources and opinions that God wants us to work hard to reach out to the lost in whatever way we can and reach out to people that maybe they're not lost, but are just of a different opinion than we are about current events and they see it in a different way. So having intentionally having a balanced news diet is honoring to God so that we can yeah, have better conversations and be more compassionate and get less entrenched in our own camps of political affiliations. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. That's 100% true and you're making me think I'd never really thought about that, but there are times where I will hold on to something that I heard on a podcast or on a news source and I'll hold on to it like it's it's my belief it's what I think and then I'll have a conversation with my husband who I love and I respect and he has a different perspective on it. I'm like how can you have a different perspective on this very thing?
thing. I heard such and such say it. And I've learned to relax and have more open and kind conversations. And I never thought about that as a result of having more balanced diet. But that does make sense to me. And when I start talking, I think having more kind conversations will help us in every way and led by the spirit. And so what I was going to say is also, you know, know where you are. Know if today is a day that you need to turn off the news and you just need to pray or just need to listen to worship music or just need silence. That's okay. I've lived that. But if it's not then it's a day that you can engage in some taking in the news, but always through that biblical perspective. And that is again, well, I like the poor over because it is a biblical perspective. Everything that is happening today can be viewed through the biblical lens. And that's how we need to do it. So, you know, praying first, finding out where you are on this day and honoring that. Because I think God answers prayers when we ask him. And setting healthy boundaries. I can't say that enough and going back to what you originally shared about you realized that you needed to step back from that. I think that is so healthy. But I think the thing that we think though is that we're going to miss out. And that's a big, a big thing in our culture. Nobody wants to miss out fear of missing out. That is huge. Right. And here's the truth of the matter. Nine times out of 10. If you take that step back, you will not have missed anything. Yes. You might have missed an event that took place that they wanted you to know about. But overall, you're still getting the gist of what's going on. If you plug into a new source that's unbiased and you want to know, you want to stay abreast of current events, but you don't want to get in all the weeds of everything. Yes. And that is healthy, I think, to send those limits for yourself. That is a good boundary to have. So if you're wondering, I tell you, I know the perfect person you should ask in his name is Jesus. Because and if you have doubts about, you know, something that we shared, and it's not good for you, that's what I love about your take on it. That is totally customizable to who are you? Because we have Kelly who loves current events and very plugged in. And I think I'm somewhere in between. Yeah. But but probably more so on on Trisha's side because we tend to be the more emotional, you know, feeling kind of people, but just knowing what is right for you and being able to customize that, you do have a choice. And I think that's another thing that we don't think, right? Yeah. We're going to miss out on something and we don't really have a choice. If it's breaking news, we need to know about it, right? No. That is designed to keep you hooked in so that you watch longer. So just take that to Jesus and ask him what he would have you to do and ask God, try praying this prayer. This is kind of radical. I know, but God, how can I honor you with how I take in and process the news? That's a pretty good answer. I can. That's a prayer he will answer. And if you've got ideas, things that you use that you'd like to share with us, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at
[email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. We always do a little happy dance when we get an email from you. You also check out all the Facebook pages. We'd love to hear from you there. And before you go, if wherever you get this podcast, if you would like, subscribe, leave a comment, all those things help more people to learn about the girl talk podcast, not so they can know about us. No, so they can know about Jesus. That's why we do this. So if you do that before you leave, we sure would appreciate it. And you know what? We're going to save you a seat next time we gather around these microphones for the next girl talk podcast.
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