I don’t watch the news because it feels me with despair. When I occasionally run across a particularly horrific story, like I did today (babies ground up and put into pills), it fills me with a sense of hopelessness. There’s not a thing I can do to change what’s happening in China and for all I know, right here in the United States. I also try to avoid negative people who like to talk about just how awful the world is getting because I have to live here. This is the world we’ve been given for now and I can’t live a joyful life if I focus on how evil it is.

Call it putting my head in the sand, or avoiding the realities of the world. But if putting my head in the sand is what it takes for me to keep raising my children and have a joyful life, then I will do it. The thought of focusing on the bad in the world every day, filling my head with it over and over again, makes me want to give up.

Thankfully, there’s more out there to read and hear than just evil. Today I read about hope too.

The world has always been full of despair and full of hope. Simultaneously.

Sometimes despair can seem so huge, powerful and impossible to combat. And hope seems so small. It’s one tiny thing. It’s $38 a month. It’s a prayer. It’s painting a child’s toenails. It’s a child accepting Jesus as their Savior. It’s teaching one person at a time about the light of the world.

It’s the only hope at all that can make a change in this world.