The Christian imagination wasn’t “made-up reality” but “the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future.”

Recently, I received simultaneous news about two separate situations—one good and one bad. Each one involved people connected to the church I pastor. In the first scenario, a person for whom our church had been praying for years repented and believed the gospel. The second situation concerned a minor complaint against our church’s ministry.

I could not stop thinking about the second situation. In fact, my fixation on the negative news overwhelmed my thoughts and emotions so much that I struggled to even celebrate the good news.

It seems even more ridiculous when I type it out. I fixated so much on a petty complaint that I failed to celebrate an occurrence of the greatest of divine miracles—the spiritual regeneration of a person formerly dead in their trespasses and sins. I let bad news obscure my sight of the best news happening right in front of my eyes. I fixated so much on “the cares of this world” that I lost sight of God’s kingdom advancing.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t my only experience with this dynamic. In fact, I daily struggle with fixation on the negative. Perhaps you can relate. Psychologists call it “negativity bias,” and it seems to be a universal human phenomenon. Negative information has a greater impact on our thoughts and emotions than positive. If you give a person three bits of good news and one bit of bad news, he or she will likely zoom in on the bad news so much that the good news has little impact. Bad news sticks like Velcro.

It’s why news media companies specialize on negative headlines and stories. At any given moment, good things are transpiring all around us. However, human beings aren’t interested in positive stories. We crave negativity. We crave a diet of news about scandals, wars, controversies, and crimes. Fox News and CNN profit by supplying our fix.

Psychologists recommend several strategies for overcoming negativity bias, everything from unplugging from the news to keeping a gratitude journal. One author recommends reframing Jesus’s Golden Rule to make it more appealing to our negative brains: “Do not do unto others what you do not want done unto you.”

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