First , a long quote from the Shipping News.
He believed he was a newspaper reporter, yet read no paper except The Mockingburg Record, and so managed to ignore terrorism, climatological change, collapsing governments, chemical spills, plagues, recession and failing banks, floating debris, the disintegrating ozone layer. Volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes, religious frauds, defective vehicles and scientific charlatans, mass murderers and serial killers, tidal waves of cancer, AIDS, deforestation, and exploding aircraft were as remote to him as braid catches, canions and rosette-embroidered garters. Scientific journals spewed reports of mutant viruses, of machines pumping life through the near-dead, of the discovery that the galaxies were streaming apocalyptically toward an invisible Great Attractor like flies into a vacuum cleaner nozzle. That was the stuff of others' lives. He was waiting for his to begin.
E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
I almost had to rip this page out of the book to isolate it for this quote. I am not using it in context at all and I’m happy to tell you that. It is more useful to me as an adjunct to my thought.
And my thought is simple, in todays world, one can be quite satisfied to not read anything like what is described above, lest they not wait for their beginning, but fall on the floor and crumple into the fetal position and wait fearfully for death to come. I don’t know which I wish to be spared from more, but both seem like hell to me.
The best place for a good word or Good News is in the Bible. It too has its hell, but I can find no place that lifts one up while highlighting how far men and women have fallen. It too, lists enumerated disasters that have and are about to befall mankind. And along the way, it offers a fair bit of good news. Much of the Biblical record leads us to question it. But the climax is the best of the Good News, a God like us, who loves us and sent His Son into the world to enjoy us and live with us and to show us the way to the truly Good life.