How do we love our neighbours in an exhausting world?
Written by Miranda Brown
The faint flicker of my phone brightens my room as I scroll through social media. Each swipe reveals stories of natural disasters, news of violence, and unrest. Everywhere I look I can find another crisis begging for attention, pleading for help.
Between the doom-scrolling and silent prayers, I’ve become more and more numb to each heavy headline, paralyzed by each catastrophe.
Currently, Canadians spend nearly two hours per day on average on social media. Young adults spend even more, and also use social media to receive the majority of their news. Social media activism is one way that teenagers and young adults strive to fight injustice. But with complete access to global information in the palm of our hand, many of us are becoming burned out by the constant barrage of bad news.
Our efforts to take action seem futile, giving way to despair and what’s often called compassion fatigue, which can result from stress, burnout, and emotional exhaustion.
We hardly have the mental or physical capacity to respond to the quantity of disasters we hear about every day. Instead of motivating us to make a difference, this level of exposure can cause us to numb out as a way of coping.
As Christians, we are called to have compassion for everyone. Our mission is to shine the light of Jesus on the earth, seek justice, and love our neighbours. We are called to have faith and works—and be set apart from the world. Being like Christ means helping those in need, feeding those who are hungry, and loving persistently in the face of suffering and injustice.
But when everything seems like too much for us to handle, how do we revitalize our compassion and avoid burnout? While wrestling with this question, I did an internship with Tearfund Canada, a Christian relief and development organization that focuses on long-term, sustainable development for those in poverty.
Through this work, I was exposed to more world issues than I realized existed. One story completely rocked me. It was of a refugee woman who lost her seven-year-old son to a curable blood disease only because they could not afford the medication.
There is unspeakable grief all around us. Like this story, children in some parts of the world die for lack of treatments that are commonplace in other parts of the world.
But amid these horrors, I am also learning that there are more solutions and possibilities than I ever imagined. None of us are meant to bear the weight of sorrow alone.
As Christians, we are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus. We are to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8). God wants us to fight injustice—but we are not meant to do it by ourselves! Our attempts to not be overwhelmed by this world’s brokenness are futile without the help of God.
For those of us feeling numb in the face of suffering—whether in your neighbourhood or in another country—we can trust that God is bigger than any crisis.
God can give us strength and renew our compassion. Taking practical steps to make a difference can also become part of what gives us hope. Here are three ways to start:
- Pray. You might not always have the words, but keep crying out to God. Don’t give up out of numbness or anger. Our God hears us! We can ask him to help us trust him, and to reveal where we can help.
- Start small. Pick one cause you care deeply about. Perhaps you’ll pull out your calculator and figure out what you can donate to a charity supporting that cause. Or maybe you set aside time to volunteer. Countless organizations are making long-term impacts across the globe. Investing in the good work of making some area of wrong a little better can pull us out of despair, contributing to our own healing too.
- Limit social media usage. By setting careful boundaries on social media, you separate yourself from the constant stream of difficult news. Resting and taking breaks from heavy news gives you greater emotional bandwidth to respond to problems right in front of you. The Bible instructs us to rest. The importance of the Sabbath shows us that God knows our limits and doesn’t ask us to be superhumans.
Until Christ comes again, we can prayerfully and faithfully respond by being Jesus’ hands and feet in this broken world, looking to him for our strength. As Galatians 6:9 reminds us, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
Miranda Brown is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English writing and media & communications at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ont. Aside from studying, she works part-time for Tearfund Canada.