Making sense

I watch the news often. Having children who catch the school bus, I have to check the weather daily. I watch the evening news and I'll love reading Yahoo! News. With all the intake of news, I started noticing a pattern.

I first noticed it when Obama and Huckabee won Iowa. It was interesting to watch all the commentators scrambling to explain how this happened when these two candidates weren't expected to win. Lots of pollsters, university professors, and political analyst were all spinning their logic on the outcome.

Then today, I read a story on 2 church fires in the south. In the lead of the article, the reported said that the two arsonist dabbled in Satanism. It was like it was they were trying to explain why someone would burn a church. To me, if the two only dabbled in Satanism, that doesn't warrant mentioning it. That could be completely insignificant. They may have dabbled in drugs, too, but no one mentioned that. But Satanism is now listed as a reason people burn down churches, when the problem could actually be something else.

We get a lot of explanations with the news, which is actually isn't their job. We watch the news for facts, but if we looked closely, we see that only a very small part of the news is actually fact. So much of it is opinion and statements that cannot be proven. If I hear one more person talk about who going to win the 2008 Presidential Campaign, I'm going to scream because at this point, no one knows but God.

I must admit I can see why we get some many explanations in the news. It's because it's what we want. We want the movies with a happy ending where everything is all wrapped up in a neat tidy box. We want to know why. It's so much a part of our diets, it should be put on the food pyramid, right between the grains and meats.

Now, isn't it more interesting that God doesn't give us the whys all the time? We are asked to live by faith, which sometimes means having no explanation at all, when we thrive on knowing why. God challenges us to go beyond our understanding when understanding has been elevated to such a high degree in our culture.