Intentionally Happily Oblivious

Interesting title eh? My husband coined this term while we were talking about a dear friend (several friends actually) who is intentionally happily oblivious to the world around her. Not only does she not know what’s going on in the world (i.e. watching/reading the news), she purposefully does NOT watch the news or keep up with the nation’s political temperament. She is happy to do so too!

She is completely content to have her head in the sand, like an ostrich. She’s set up a nice happy home down there in the sand. A beautiful home, but a sandy one.

This boggles my mind. First of all, I’m jealous. I would love to live in “Mayberry” and be happily oblivious to my surroundings. However, that’s not my nature. I like being informed, to a point. I like to know what’s going on so I can make decisions based on this information. If I didn’t watch/read any news I wouldn’t be aware of a homegrown terrorist wreaking havoc in downtown Denver; hypothetically speaking of course. If I knew about an event like this, I probably wouldn’t go to Denver that day! Realistically, however, we don’t go to Denver unless it’s absolutely necessary.

A few months ago I made a vlog about the situational awareness color codes:

If you remember, yellow I where we want to be. Yellow means that we are simply aware! We aren’t twitchy, we aren’t paranoid, we are running around with our guns up looking for a perceive threat; we are simply aware of our surroundings.

This HAS to apply to a national and global aspect as well. We have to know what’s going on in our city, county, state, country, and the world so we can make more informed decisions on the safety of our family.

I think everyone has their ‘thing’ that they don’t want to know about. I think everyone is scared enough of something that they refuse to believe it’s going to happen, so they don’t want to waste their time learning about it. Or perhaps they KNOW it will happen, so again, they don’t want to waste their time learning about it.

I have my “thing”; what’s yours?

My thing is the rapture, tribulation, and surrounding events. Basically the entire book of Revelation. Honestly, it scares the living daylights out of me. Not because I’m unsure of where I’m going when I die, but because I’m unsure of how much of that my children will have to see before the Lord returns. As a mother, we always want to protect our kids from seeing things that will scare them. We also want to protect them from a situation in which they might have their freedoms taken away. This would be one of those situations. Although the Bible is clear enough in most aspects, I believe there’s still a lot of speculations in the nitty gritty details of how this happens. My knowing or not knowing anything about these events isn’t going to change them either! They’re going to happen anyway.

If you turn on any news channel, you’ll see that the “end times” are already in progress. It could be another 200 years, sure! However, I think the stage is being set for a timeframe much closer than 200 years. I really think my children are going to see the direct precursors to this event, if not the event itself.

Back to what I was saying, one must be aware of what’s going on. Most of the time it won’t change their daily routine, but there will always be that one instance that changes everything for them. Now you might be thinking, what does Aleppo have to do with getting my kids to school on time? Or, what do the indigenous people of North Dakota and their pipeline have to do making it to my doctor’s appointment? Well, my dear friend, there will come a day where watching the news will benefit you.

One of these days may be a traffic accident on your route to work. It may also be how to vote for the next Commander-in-Chief. It could be that our country is going to war overseas again and you had no idea that your family member was deploying; or even the possibility of it. These are all things that we can know by being aware of global and national events.

It’s also critical to know what’s going on in your town. You might be thinking “oh I know all the gossip of my little town; I’m covered here.” Well, even in our little town, that many think of as “Mayberry”, we have bad stuff that happens. Some dear friends of ours had their garage broken into a few years ago. We had a ‘crazy lady’ high on meth wreak havoc in OUR neighborhood a few months ago. She was attacking lamp posts, vehicles, and people with a mining pickaxe! We’ve also had some vehicle thefts over the years. Now the thing about all these crimes is that it wasn’t people FROM my cute little town, it was people from other little towns that wanted to cause problems. They just didn’t want to cause problems in their own cute little town.

It’s important to understand those bad things can and do happen all around us. They happen close to home. They happen far away, yet still to the ones we love. We need to be aware of the bad things happening or the potential of bad things happening so we can take care of our family. We need to have that knowledge so we can protect our kids. Ultimately that’s our goal in life right? To protect the ones we love? You’ve heard the saying, “knowledge is power”, and in this case, it’s absolutely true. Knowledge is power. The Bible even speaks of knowledge and wisdom being incredible assets. It’s not just being knowledgeable at one or two things. It’s having that general overview of many things and taking the time to do the research necessary on those topics that you feel may be a danger to your family.

 

Cheers,

Nila