The world is kindling.

Wars and rumors of wars persist.

We’re temporary residents of a mad, beautiful, chaotic world, a fallen world. You open the news and it’s like a perpetual apocalypse ticker-tape parade. Divisiveness is Plan A and war has a cheering section. Hate, it turns out, does have a home here and it’s a crowded neighborhood. So you see this and the natural inclination, the well-meaning, earnest impulse, is to go, “Enough is enough! How do I fix this mess?”

That yearning for justice, that urge to make things right – it’s a divine spark. But hold on. Before you go full Joan of Arc, scribble your manifesto, or start a podcast take a breath. Because what if I told you that while we’re all out there trying to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, or warning about the iceberg, you should probably remember you’re already on the lifeboat.

Jesus has already saved us.

And when He rose, he didn’t instruct us to make sure nobody ever sinned again and return the world to Him in a nice ribbon where everyone was happy, content, and saved. You know what he asked us to do?

Not to lie. Not to be too proud. Go to Mass as often as we can. Forgive our brother for saying that really stupid thing he said three thanksgivings ago when he was drunk. Be loving to your spouse and children. Be patient. Go to confession. Use your God given talents to the best of your ability to spread the word of God to the world. And trust and love God above all things.

That’s pretty much our responsibility.

Well, that’s a bit easier than world peace, isn’t it?

Here’s the thing, the radical, revolutionary truth that cuts through all the noise: you are not, my friend, fundamentally responsible for the state of the world. You’re not personally liable for the entirety of human folly across millennia. That’s a burden too great for all but one.

Your true, unshakeable, profound responsibility, the one that you actually have direct, moment-to-moment agency over, is the state of your soul. That’s it. But that’s no easy task. That’s the real heavy lifting. That’s the hard work. It’s easy to yell at people online and patiently explain why they’re Nazis. It can be harder to wash the dishes, care for a sick child, shovel a neighbor’s driveway, show patience when you just have none, or drive someone somewhere when you’re bone tired. Every day.

It means running that internal diagnostic and rooting out all that unnecessary fear, anger, resentment, and petty grievances you’ve been storing away. It means giving up the constant comparisons to your neighbor and tracking your material acquisitions against theirs. It means really questioning whether you are really calling for justice or demanding conformity?

Are you cultivating peace, compassion, and a sense of connection to something greater than your own ego?

And here’s the ironic and counter-intuitive part of all this, if enough of us redirect our energies from the global parade of crises and focus on the state of our souls, the world will actually improve through grace, love, and mercy.