Family members sit atop boulders, weary from lifting rocks to look for bodies. Men with shovels bend under the burden of sorrow and energy as they work to depart literally no stone unturned. Disaster has struck again: An enormous mudslide in Papua New Guinea on Friday morning buried an estimated 2,000 people alive, covering dozens of homes and an elementary school.
By now, it seems protected to assume that anyone not yet rescued from under as much as 26 feet of debris has died. I flip from story to story, on the lookout for more information, but eventually I actually have to stop. I’m beginning to feel claustrophobic myself, imagining a roar of mud and rock waking me from my early morning slumber.
I had an all too similar experience with the video of the bridge collapse in Baltimore earlier this 12 months. As I watched, I remember realizing I used to be holding my breath. The night lights of Baltimore glittered within the background. It was almost cinematic—I might need mistaken the scene for the start of a Nineteen Eighties rom-com, the town shot right before the credits roll—were it not for the dark silhouette of the ship hitting the bridge, reminding me of the reality: There were trucks and staff on that bridge because it fell. I couldn’t see their faces, but I used to be watching people die.
And it’s not only Baltimore and Papua New Guinea. Over the past 12 months, as producer of CT’s news podcast, The Bulletin, I’ve been exposed to many tragedies from afar. I’ve read photographic essays about Ukrainians who retrieve dead Russian bodies from the battlefield, scrolling through to get the gist and trying to not linger on the graphic images. I’ve read accounts of faculty shootings and racially motivated crimes and needed to pause for a deep breath. I’ve scanned reports of famous personalities who’ve died and felt the familiar twinge of distant sadness. And I actually am no stranger to death.
Yet for all that, sometimes once I encounter tragedies like these, a thought flits across my mind: It might have been worse. I stop myself short, embarrassed. Have I change into indifferent and callous? Or have I simply seen an excessive amount of?
I’m not alone in wondering. As early because the Seventies, researchers began to lift an alarm about how visual depictions of violence may very well be detrimental to viewers, especially children. After seeing violent footage of the 9/11 attacks or school shootings, for instance, research subjects reported greater distress than those that had only heard or read in regards to the same events.
These results were hardly a surprise. Participating, even vicariously, within the suffering of others can bring great pain, anxiety, and sometimes lasting trauma. If a death in a single’s circle of relatives could destroy a small, known universe, how can the human mind comprehend loss on a far larger scale?
Separation by pixels only makes a lot difference. We don’t have to be flesh-and-blood witnesses for suffering to make an indelible mark, and our digital media environment is designed to make us witnesses of tragedy each day. Doomscrolling past one troubling headline after one other can result in increased feelings of frustration, worry, and despair. Is it any wonder three in 4 Americans say they’re “overwhelmed by the variety of crises facing the world at once”?
The constant stream of local and global suffering we see on our screens can leave us weary, numb, or disillusioned. We may let lapse the type of presence and care to which God calls us. Desensitized, we learn to gloss over “smaller” tragedies, letting only mass casualties provoke our sorrow, instituting a hierarchy of grief and forgetting the gravity of each marker of sin and death on this broken world.
Both science and Scripture confirm that God never designed us to be Atlas, carrying the entire world’s suffering on our shoulders. Jesus got here to bear that weight for us (1 Pet. 2:24). Yet God did create us to “carry one another’s burdens, and in this manner … fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). He formed mirror neurons in our brains in order that even on the cellular level we could understand each other’s pain. He commanded us to comfort one another from the wellspring of comfort we ourselves have received (2 Cor. 1:4)—a task that, admittedly, can seem almost not possible amid a continuing onslaught of bad news.
So how will we fulfill the commandment to like our neighbor as ourselves after we’re undecided we will bear their stories of sorrow?
In my work at The Bulletin and beyond, I’ve benefited from advice from creator and therapist Aundi Kolber, who encourages us to guard against an uncharitable numbness by caring first for ourselves. “When Jesus says, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” Kolber told me in an interview, “now we have to acknowledge the wisdom of ‘yourself’ is included there.”
Practically speaking, which means scrutinizing my media intake, creating deadlines for engagement, and resisting the tendency toward consuming media in isolation. Kolber really helpful reading or listening to the news as a “single-minded” activity, not as a part of our regular multitasking routines. This lets us attend to our bodies’ responses of tension or discomfort while “witnessing from a spot of dignity and integrity.”
For others, different boundaries could also be more helpful, in keeping with our personalities, our wounds, and the person capacities with which God has equipped us. On a recent episode of The Bulletin, host and CT editor in chief Russell Moore noted that some Christians may have to step back from media consumption for a season to as an alternative engage deeply with Scripture. For others, said cohost Mike Cosper, a conscious differentiation between public and private life could also be helpful.
Whatever practical changes we make to our media habits, though, it would still be difficult to bear witness to the suffering of the world, to sit down with the statistics in regards to the war in Gaza, stories of gun violence, or testimonies of racial injustice. Our tenderness to tragedy will prove more durable if it’s anchored in community lament.
In lament, “we sensitize and strengthen our hearts,” writes singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken. Whether in a Sunday morning worship ritual of the prayers of the people, a Wednesday night prayer service, or a special gathering for a selected tragedy, corporate lament offers us an outlet for the emotions which may otherwise overwhelm us.
Together, we name injustice and tragedy and place it inside the greater narrative arc of God’s redemptive faithfulness. We are reminded that God cares in regards to the headlines, that he reigns over all worldly leaders (Dan. 2:21), that not even the “smallest” tragedy escapes his notice (Matt. 10:29). It is here, says creator Sheila Wise Rowe, in grieving and growing with others, that we discover “our pain and anger are transformed and mobilized from expressions of despair into signs of hope.”
In all this, one thing is bound: God calls us to reply to suffering. As I scan the headlines each week, preparing a latest episode of The Bulletin, I attempt to scrape off the calluses that construct up on my heart.
When my eyes catch on a story that details great hurt, I often pray, Come quickly, Lord Jesus (Rev. 22:20). When I read statistics about disasters, I pause to keep in mind that each number represents a reputation, an individual for whom Christ died. As I scan the unfamiliar faces in newspaper pictures, I think of those faces I do know—family and friends in need, folks I support in grief care groups. We’re all sure together in our eager for redemption within the midst of a broken world, and I ask God to “break my heart for the things that break the center of God.”
Finally, I look for methods to act, whether through a donation to a faraway cause or direct care in my community. I could not find a way to supply a cup of cold water to a Ukrainian widow, but I can send funds overseas and look after widows in my church. I could not find a way to resolve the conflict within the Middle East, but I can seek to be a peacemaker in my workplace and in my neighborhood. Even within the face of the very worst news, I’m not powerless—and God will not be powerless either.
“In this world you’ll have trouble,” Jesus told his disciples. “But take heart! I actually have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Across the millennia, we provide a heartbroken amen. This world will not be correctly, as every day’s headlines clarify anew. But those headlines needn’t send us into despair or make us cower in protective indifference. Though sin, death, and the devil make the news, Christ has overcome all of them.
Clarissa Moll is the producer of Christianity Today’s weekly news podcast, The Bulletin.
