You do not stop carrying the weight of the news by caring less or by willing yourself calm. You stop by practicing, on purpose and on a schedule, the act of handing the world back to the One who can actually hold it. This guide gives you one way to do that: a weekly rhythm of lament built from two short psalms and from Pastor Chris Brooks’s counsel on what he calls the beauty of limits. You will set the world down in prayer, then pick back up only what God has placed within your reach.
The guide works alone with a notebook and a Bible. It also works for a small group meeting once to learn the rhythm and again a week later to compare notes. Plan on about forty-five minutes for the first session and twenty minutes for each weekly practice after that. Nothing here asks you to share what you write. Every exercise can stay private.
Start with an honest count
Before reading anything, take five minutes and list every piece of news that reached you in the last twenty-four hours. Include headlines, alerts, clips, group texts and things someone told you at work. Do not sort or judge them yet. Just count.
Then look at the list and mark each item with one of two letters. Put an A beside anything you could actually act on this week: pray about specifically, give toward, show up for, call someone about, vote on. Put a W beside anything you could only watch. Most people find the W column much longer. Keep this page. You will come back to it at the end.
Lisa Fields opens the conversation behind this guide by naming the same pile: planes, the president, bird flu, friends in Washington worried about their jobs. Her summary of how it feels is blunt: “Everything is sinking sand.” Brooks does not argue with the feeling. He asks what kind of creature can bear that load, and his answer is that we cannot.
A prayer that keeps asking how long
Read Psalm 13 aloud, slowly. It is six verses of poetry, and it should be read as a prayer, not a formula. It opens this way:
“How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?” (Psalm 13:1-2)
Notice three things before you move on.
First, David says “how long” four times in two verses. He does not hurry past the complaint. Scripture preserves the repetition.
Second, look at the phrase “take counsel in my soul” in verse 2. In older English, to take counsel is to deliberate, to turn something over and over. David describes a mind working the problem all day with sorrow underneath it. That is a fair picture of what endless refreshing does to a person.
Third, watch where the turn comes. Verse 3 is a request: “Consider and hear me, O LORD my God” (Psalm 13:3). Then verse 5 says, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5). The psalm never reports that the enemy was defeated or that the circumstances changed. The trust arrives inside the trouble, addressed to God, while the questions are still open.
Here is the point this guide builds on. Lament is a third option most of us forget we have. When the news is heavy, we tend to do one of two things: keep consuming in the hope that knowing more will settle us, or shut it off and try not to think about it. Psalm 13 does neither. David neither stops looking at the trouble nor tries to manage it alone. He turns the trouble into speech addressed to God. That is how a finite person engages a world too big for him without pretending to be bigger than he is.
A weaned child
Now read Psalm 131. It is only three verses.
“LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever.” (Psalm 131:1-3)
“Exercise myself” here means to busy or occupy oneself. The psalmist is not claiming to be ignorant of great matters. He is saying he has stopped making them his job. The image of a weaned child is usually read as a child who still sits close to the mother but is no longer frantic for what only she can supply. The nearness stays and the demanding stops.
Then the final verse turns outward to the whole people. A quieted soul does not end in private calm. It ends in shared hope.
Put the two psalms side by side. Psalm 13 is the prayer you pray while the weight is still on you. Psalm 131 describes where that prayer is heading. The weekly rhythm below uses both.
What Brooks adds: the question to ask of every headline
Brooks roots his counsel in the garden. “From the garden to now God has placed beautiful limitations on humanity,” he says, pointing to the one tree Adam and Eve were told not to eat from in Genesis 2. Limits came before sin, so a limit is not proof that something has gone wrong with you.
His diagnosis of the phone follows from that. God knows everything, has all power and is present everywhere. We do not, and the feed hides that from us. Brooks says, “I’m not built to know about all the evil that’s happening through all the world.” Then he names the cost: “We’re trying to live as if we are infinite beings, and we’re not. And it’s crushing us.”
The most useful thing Brooks offers for practice is a question. Looking back on the years when every news app, sports app and market alert reached him, he describes coming to the end of the day and asking, “am I even built to know about all those things?” That question is the sorting tool for this guide. It is more precise than asking whether something is important. Many distant things are important. The question is whether you were made to hold them all at once.
He is also clear that limits are not a retreat from responsibility. He stays informed about laws and policies affecting his own community and the people he pastors. What he refuses is the all-night effort to keep up with everything. “I try to limit what I take in for the health of my own soul, because I can’t handle knowing all of it,” he says. And the gap he leaves is filled with Scripture, not with nothing.
Lisa Fields describes the same discovery from the other side. She stepped away from social media for most of January to finish a book manuscript, because scrolling, as she puts it, “becomes an addiction that you don’t even realize.” Her reason was practical. The constant intake was draining her energy and creativity.
Testing the idea
Take the strongest objection seriously before you practice anything. If Christians set the news down, does injustice get easier for comfortable people to ignore? Some of what fills the W column is real suffering happening to real people.
Read Psalm 13 again with that objection in mind. David is not ignoring his enemy. He names the enemy to God in verses 2 and 4. Lament keeps the suffering in view and refuses to let you be its only keeper. So the test of your limits is not whether you know less. It is whether what you know is going somewhere: into prayer, into action within your reach, or both. A headline that only produces dread has gone nowhere.
Also take your temperament and calling seriously. A nurse, a city council member and a college student will draw the line between A and W in different places. The rhythm below does not tell you where your line falls. It gives you a weekly place to find it.
The weekly rhythm: setting the world down
Choose one fixed time each week, ideally at the start of a day of rest. Brooks names keeping a Sabbath as one of his own limits, and this practice fits naturally there. Put the phone in another room. Bring your notebook, your Bible and about twenty minutes.
- Gather. List the news that stayed with you this week. One line per item. Include anything that kept you up, made you argue, or made you open the app again.
- Sort. Ask Brooks’s question of each item. Then mark it A or W, as you did on day one. Be honest in both directions. Some things you have been watching are actually within reach, and some things you treat as your responsibility are not.
- Lament the W column. Write a short prayer in the shape of Psalm 13. Begin with your own “how long” about one or two items. Then make a request, the way verse 3 does. Then write one sentence of trust, even if it feels thin. Do not polish it. David did not.
- Release. Read Psalm 131 aloud. Then read, “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7). Close the notebook. Some people find it helps to say out loud the names of the things they are handing over.
- Return to the A column. Pick one item and write one concrete action for the coming week: a call, a gift, a meeting, a specific prayer each morning for a named person. One is enough.
Alongside the weekly rhythm, make one daily change and keep it for seven days. Brooks turned off nearly every notification, keeping only texts and email. You might do that, set a cutoff hour for news, or keep the phone out of reach for the first part of your morning. Whatever gap you create, put Scripture into it. Philippians 4:6-7 is a good place to start: “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” In the KJV, “be careful” means be anxious or full of care. Notice what the peace guards: your heart and mind, not the headlines.
Using this with a group
In the first session, read both psalms aloud together, then give everyone ten silent minutes to try steps 1 through 3 on their own. Do not ask anyone to read their lament aloud. If someone wants to share, let them, and resist the urge to answer it with a fix or a verse. A group can simply say the final line of Psalm 131 together as a way of joining one person’s prayer.
Be aware that a news story can reach a real loss in someone’s life. Brooks speaks as a father whose oldest son died in 2019, and he says plainly that changing worldviews would not have answered his grief: “switching worldviews does not relieve the problem. I still have to answer the question, what do I do with this?” Leave room for that kind of weight in the room. Brooks also refuses to dismiss people living with clinical depression, describing faith as what helps them keep rising through dark nights. Fewer headlines are wise, but they are not treatment. If anxiety or low mood stays heavy after a few weeks of changed habits, encourage the person toward a trained counselor or doctor. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith.
When you meet the second time, spend most of the session on what people noticed, not on whether they kept the limit perfectly.
Questions to talk through
- When you sorted your list on day one, what surprised you about which column was longer, and why do you think it turned out that way?
- Psalm 13 turns to trust without reporting any change in circumstances. Does that make the trust more believable to you or less? Why?
- Brooks asks whether we are built to know about all those things. Where would you push back on that question, and where does it land for you?
- What is the difference, in your own habits, between staying informed out of love and staying informed out of fear? What would someone watching your week see?
- Psalm 131 ends by turning to the whole community. What changes when the work of setting the world down is shared rather than done alone?
- Which item from your W column was hardest to release, and what do you think makes it so hard?
One week later
Go back to the page you wrote on day one. Make a fresh count of the last twenty-four hours and sort it the same way. Then put the two pages side by side. Has the W column shrunk? Has the A column changed? Did your lament prayer from the weekly rhythm sound any different from the first one you wrote?
Brooks says simply that he does not follow every move the president makes, and he sleeps well. He gives the reason in the same breath: he knows he cannot handle knowing all of it. That is the posture this rhythm is meant to train, one week at a time. Before you close the notebook, look at the one thing you picked back up for the coming week and ask whether God actually handed it to you, or whether you took it back on your own.