Set your mind on the things above

As I type this, the Glen Beck show is on Fox News. Keith usually uses a headset for his viewing entertainment because I am not much of a TV fan and the audio is distracting while I try to stare at my favorite screen…the one on my lap top….and read or “write.” So, I am only seeing the picture…thankfully….no sound. I can see the scrolling subtitles predicting all kinds of doom and gloom. (hard to miss a 62 inch screen 15 feet in front of you)

This is a worst case scenario show. This show comes with a viewer discretion warning after every commercial break. Travel will be nonexistent in 2014 because it is too dangerous. Survival skills will be vital by the year 2014. The dollar will be worth nothing by then. The pipeline could be destroyed in 2010. .Iran will have Nuclear Power. Because the internet connects the world, individual militias will be springing up all over the place because of the “Bubba Effect.” (What is the Bubba Effect?)

I did catch an episode of Glen Beck a few weeks ago. Big mistake. Doom and gloom…disaster right around the corner in the economy….the internet (because of bot networks) etc. etc. etc. I told Keith that if I watched his show very often, I would be a nervous wreck.

Predictions of the world ending really rattle me. I trace it back to when I lived on and off with my grandparents who were sure the world was going to end "any day now"....surely before I grew up…and they told me so. What a thing to tell a ten year old. I can vividly remember one of the conversations....

“But Grandma….I want to grow up!!!”

“It would be nice, but I don’t think you will”

Scared the crap out of me. It still scares me. And they were post trib believers so not one iota of the pain and horror, bugs as big as Volkswagens and Godzilla monsters coming up out of the ocean (a Lynn Hiles quote) would be escaped. If there was going to be a believer of the rapture, I think I would pick the pre-trib view…..

During the first Gulf War, I was petrified. I was not a Christian then…so I only had enough information to truly spook me. I used to walk at the mall….and I remember passing the Christian bookstore with its display of books outside the entrance…all about the problems in the mid-east and Armageddon…666….the coming one world market etc. I had avert my gaze when I hoofed it (briskly) past that store.

So now….16 or so years later, I AM a Christian…and I have a whole different view of many things. Still it is not all that difficult to arouse those dormant fears and send me into a near panic about the end of days scenarios. I can’t let myself get sucked into that mindset….and the following verse comes to mind:

"If then you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." Col. 3:1-3

Summing it all up, friends, I'd say you'll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious--the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Philippians 4:8