The big picture of America today is intense. One look at the price of gas and my anxiety shoots up right along with those numbers! War, government shutdown, and voting redistricting ramp up emotions. Every day uncovers a new crisis!
Here’s the thing. You cannot control what happens in the world, but you are in charge of how you respond when your own anxiety rises.
We began this series by zooming out. In an effort to look beyond the reactive, emotional intensity in our nation, I described America as a gas-filled room where people keep lighting matches. This way of thinking is called systems thinking.
Systems thinking challenges you to be thoughtful instead of reactive – to look beyond the immediate, flammable frustration (war, shutdown, redistricting) and investigate the cause of the gas leak, or the anxiety. It is easy to get upset when a match is lit. It is more difficult to slow down, notice what else is going on, and decide how to respond.
Last week, I wrote that in emotionally intense times, hate binds people together. When anxiety rises and emotions are ramped up, we join a group – maybe adhere ourselves to a political party, or become a Swiftie. The options are endless! Instead of slowing down to think through what “I” believe and value, “we” remain stuck together by our intense feelings.1
One more summary of the first two posts in this series:
- We zoomed out to confirm that we live in an anxious society. The individual, flammable frustrations (war, shutdown, redistricting) are not the problem, the problem is the gas filling the room.
- We confirmed that in anxious times, we react quickly rather than respond thoughtfully, and find our “tribe.” When emotions ramp up, we tend to rely more on intense feelings of togetherness than on our best, individual thinking, leaving society stuck in the gas-filled room.
What now? Knowing that you can only control how you respond and nothing else, what path might you take out of the gas-filled room?
The path out of the gas-filled room begins at your doorstep.
Let’s zoom back in, all the way into your neighborhood.
Ben Sasse is a former Republican senator of Nebraska. In an interview with 60 Minutes, he spoke of mending the brokenness of politics by starting where you live. Rather than getting caught up in the impossible, big political arguments, think neighbor-to-neighbor. “I think your fundamental political community is your neighborhood, and your city hall and maybe even your state legislature.”
Neighbor-to-neighbor is actually something you and I can work on; it is one path you and I can take to thoughtfully slow down and respond, instead of quickly react in this anxious moment in America’s life. Start in your own neighborhood.
A few years ago, I told the story of a failed attempt at a neighborhood get-together one summer. A couple of years later, the results were different. Marcus and I hosted 25 or so neighbors in our backyard.
It was a casual pizza party.2 Kids played. Neighbors young and old chatted. The group included a cyber security expert, doctor, teachers, retired folks, an oil field employee and a rowdy group of kids, among others.
I believe neighborhoods are safer when we take time to get to know one another, neighbor-to-neighbor. What do you believe about neighborhoods?
A casual pizza party will not fix war, shutdowns or redistricting. It will not immediately fix the gas leak in anxious America. Yet, it is one small step toward mending the brokenness.
I believe that professing I am a Christian requires me to be invested in my neighborhood – to look up and down the street for neighbors to get to know, even to rely on at times.
The big picture of America may be intense. Remember, your sole responsibility is not to fix it, but to decide how you might thoughtfully respond. Instead of lighting a match, or letting another match ramp you up, let the light of Christ guide you into the way of peace – peace for you and for your neighbor.
Photo by Marcus Moore on Unsplash
- Of course, there are times in a society when matches need to be lit: slavery must end, women must vote, LGBTQ people must be recognized as human beings. There are matches that need to be lit for the sake of justice, don’t get me wrong. Here, I am focusing on lighting matches that are not thoughtful or productive, but reactive to the anxiety. ↩︎
- In this blog post, I shared that Shannan Martin wrote one of my favorite books on this subject. ↩︎
Lisa Lewton 