Reading the news, I can see how one might be overcome with a sense of hopelessness and despair. Everywhere you look it seems the news is bad, prompting one Associated Press writer to ask “Is Everything spinning out of control?” He writes, “Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism … Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale … In California, leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought …” On and on it goes.

In the last national opinion poll, carried out by ABC News and the Washington Post two weeks ago, only 29 percent approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling the job as president—it’s even worse for the Democratic-led Congress—and a whopping 84 percent of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction. (Among those surveyed making less than $25,000 annually, the figure tops 90 percent!) Finally, the percentage of those who think the country is going in the right direction is the lowest it has been since Jimmy Carter was in office. In all, Americans are suffering a hypersense of pessimism.

Of course the “news of the day,” as Neil Postman observed, is a “figment of our technological imagination media. It is … a media event” (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 8). It is a concentrated compilation of the most distressing, sordid, and scandalous events that appeal to our voyeuristic tendencies and heighten our sense that “everything is spinning out of control.”

For many Christians, this sense of frustration with the country’s direction is not all that new and recent events, as well as the news, have only exacerbated their concerns. However, I am amazed at the level of pessimism among so many Christians that I encounter. I think this may also be a product of too much reliance on politics. This is, after all, the pressing concern of the population whose frustrations center mostly on the failed expectations of their political leaders and government: the economy, the war, fuel prices, and so on. Add to that concerns over the moral direction of the nation, and the church often appears indifferent or defeated.

This is puzzling to me. How can Christians be pessimistic about the future when they serve the risen King whose kingdom has no end? Do so many fail to realize that our God reigns? Do so many fail to understand that God is sovereign over all things and that His redemptive work in the world is and will be carried to its full completion? There is nothing in the world that can stop the redemptive mission of God as Daniel reminds us:

His dominion is an eternal dominion; his kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing. He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him: “What have you done?” (Daniel 4:34–35, NIV)