David McElroy

Can you distinguish between things you can control and things you can’t control? If so, do you have the ability to focus only on what you can control? Can you treat what you can’t control as simple environmental reality?

I’ve started noticing over the last week or so that there are different sorts of fear. Yes, there are a lot of specific fears, but I’ve suddenly become very aware of one basic differences between the types of fear.

Almost everybody who is aware of what’s going on in the world is afraid right now. We have just entered a dangerous time, so it’s rational to be afraid. But some people seem paralyzed by their fears and other people seem energized by their fears.

And these wildflowers in my back yard taught me the difference Friday afternoon.

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What if you‘re a helper, but the coronavirus crisis that’s going on in our world today means you can’t be with the ones you want to help?

Johnny Russell was driving by an abandoned K-Mart shopping center near Lewiston, Maine, Thursday morning when he saw this vehicle with a lone woman and a hand-lettered sign that said, “I miss you.” As he slowed to read the sign, the woman smiled and waved, so he stopped to chat.

The woman told Russell she’s a teacher for a school in Maine School Administrative District 52 in Turner, Maine. He asked her how she’s coping with schools being closed — and being away from her students.

“With great concern on her face, she told me how she was listening to the news this morning and for the first time in her life she had heart palpitations,” Russell reports. “She said she knew she had to act immediately and in a positive way to help her grief subside, so she reached out to her students online and asked them to meet her at the parking lot and pick up some gifts she had for them.”

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When something has been wrong for a long time — or when books have been out of balance — there eventually comes a day of reckoning. That’s when debits and credits are added up and there’s either a credit or a price to be paid.

In our culture, we have been living on borrowed time for about a hundred years, because we’ve built prosperity on a foundation made of shifting sand. Today, we face the possibility of that system crashing down around us. Most people are scared and they have reason to be.

Who can you trust as we enter this age of reckoning, when all that we’ve known is probably going to be torn down?

Preview of next week’s show: We’re going to continue looking at the coming age of reckoning, starting with the things that have gone wrong and how we can make the best of some days which threaten to be very dark for most people.

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