Choose Your Drama

Choose your drama. There is no shortage. Every streaming service can supply a few thousand options for you, and if fiction isn’t your preference the news is a never-ending reality show (based on a true story) that nobody has the guts to cancel. Too dark? You can follow the stars, watching for which celebrities are rising, which are falling, and which are cheating. Or sports. Or soaps. Or our newest option: a steady stream of short, viral video clips that are always ready to provoke a reaction—whether good or bad or surprising or outrageous or intriguing or ridiculous or sweet or funny or comfortable or all of the above one after another for as long as you can keep your eyes open.

Choose your drama. They’re all vying for your attention, shouting, popping up, playing on your emotions, always accessible and ready to give you the satisfaction of feeling something—because there is a kind of satisfaction in feeling, even if the feeling is bad. And the handy thing about receiving our feelings prepackaged and streamed through the internet is that it’s easier to put them back in our pocket or change channels when we’ve had enough. The real world isn’t nearly as accommodating.

Choose your drama. There’s plenty beyond the screens and screaming headlines. Every relationship you make and maintain in the real world will come with dramatic action at some point. There will be disagreements, misunderstandings, fights, and—hopefully—forgiveness and reconciliation. There will be surprise challenges, sickness, losses, and ecstatic victories. There will be tears of sorrow, frustration, and happiness. The deeper you go into any relationship, the deeper the challenges will be—and the joys. Or you can choose, if you want to, to keep your emotional distance from the untidy and often unmanageable people and circumstances around you and get your emotional satisfaction from fictional or far removed sources, instead. Life is undeniably easier that way. The trouble with this approach is that the life you’ll be living and the emotions you’ll be experiencing are no longer your own.

Choose your drama. Anyone can live inside a bubble of endless entertainment, or spend their days perpetually angry at the news, or wrap themselves up in the lives of distant stars. Entertainment and news are fine, in their place. But God didn’t put you on planet earth to live out your days in a fog of second-hand emotions passed down from others. He made you who you are and put you where you are to live your own life—and the more you lean into that, the more dramatic action you’ll experience. Action comes from activity, not passive consumption, and dramatic victories and losses are felt most by those who participated in the fight. If you choose to live in the real world, and especially if you choose to love real people with real, hands-on, up-close, tangible, active, involved, sacrificial love then you’ll never have a shortage of meaningful dramatic action to keep your emotions occupied. Love is many things, but it is never boring.

Life in the real world with real people can be hard. When it starts feeling overwhelming you can’t change the channel. It’s difficult, but it’s your own. It’s dramatic, but it’s what God made you for. The Apostle Paul encouraged the Thessalonians to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you” (1 Thessalonians 4:11). If he was giving this advice today, I wonder it he would add an encouragement to stop getting so caught up and distracted with second-hand drama and start focusing more on living the life God made you for, right where you are, with the people he put you with. Mind your business. Choose your drama—not someone else’s.