Praying through Your Newsfeed

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

It’s an odd word, but I instantly understood why someone coined it: Doomscrolling is a new term for our tendency (temptation?) to scroll through bad news on our digital devices, even though that news is disheartening and often depressing. Here’s how it goes: You find yourself transfixed by the stories, many of which concern COVID-19 or the humanitarian shambles in Afghanistan or the potshots politicians take. You get pulled in, and it’s hard to pull away. For some of us the same thing happens with a newspaper or newscast. A kind of morbid curiosity means we have trouble turning off the streaming scenes and commentary.

It may surprise you to discover the relevance your prayers have to the very things you hear or watch. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth once counseled, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both.” I’d add, pray with both. Barth, part of a courageous group of Christians resisting Hitler, knew that faith does not absent us from the world’s crises and urgencies. Believing in God does not mean turning our backs on the world but opening our hearts toward it in compassionate prayer. The tragedies, crises, and temptations around us provide grist for prayer for all believers, not just policy junkies.

So wrote Paul to young Timothy, “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for … kings and all who are in high positions. … This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior” (1 Timothy 2:1-3). So say you see stories of children orphaned by warfare, or a cancer patient battling for life, or a company victimizing and exploiting workers. You want not just to sit and sympathize. Something in you longs to help. Prayer allows us to carry our concern to a larger listening heart.

We follow, after all, one who said that he came “to preach good news to the poor... to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed” (Luke 4:18). Through Isaiah the prophet God spoke of religious fasting that went far beyond mere spiritual sentiment, but drove the faithful into involvement in the world:

Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

and bring the homeless poor into your house? (Isaiah 58:6-7b)

Draw close to God and you find yourself drawn out to compassion for others. See in the Trinity a God of mutual communion and you may glimpse how to better reflect God’s self-sacrificial love in the world. For the God who rises with healing in his wings comes also as a goad when I am indifferent about my neighbor. We will want to pray for a world in need, even if a scroll through the world’s needs causes us anxiety or exhaustion.

With this in mind, try something today:

Come to prayer with a newspaper (or digital device) in hand. Leaf through it, scroll through it, letting the stories remind you of situations needing rescue. Be specific. Preface your prayers with an acknowledgment that God already works in the world. Then ask away! (Caution: it’s easy to get drawn into a juicy story and get distracted from the purpose at hand!)

As you go through the day, too, let prayers arise. As you drive to work, your regular station may carry a news break. Perhaps you take in the evening news. As you listen or watch, rather than just shake your head in exasperation, let your taking in become an act of prayer.

Whatever your weariness or sadness, prayer for the world’s heartaches or the crises next door lets you participate in furthering God’s kingdom. We pray for souls, by all means, but also for God’s will to be done on earth, in desperate situations. We pray for the needy, the hungry, the disconsolate. We make praying an opportunity for connecting with a world in need, not retreating from it.

Adapted from my book, 21 Days to a Better Quiet Time with God.