Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everybody. Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weirach, and in today's episode, we're asking the question, does the gospel fix FOMO?

This is prompted by an article I read by Faith Hill in The Atlantic this week, not the country singer Faith Hill, by the way, I looked it up, but a journalist who is wrestling in her article with her own experience of something called FOMO, the fear of missing out. She talks about how every week she tells herself she's going to keep one night free, no social activities, no matter

What? And yet consistently, she ends up going out every night of the week because she's afraid that the one thing she says no to would have been that transcendent kind of life-defining experience or the inside joke that everyone's laughing at that she just wasn't there for. Fear of missing out, FOMO, is a pretty common human experience. It's something we probably all deal with.

It's interesting, though, that Patrick McInnes, who coined the term FOMO, he meant it as a positive. He described it as having so many options that you almost develop this sense of, man, there's so many things I could do. Now I'm afraid of missing out on the ones I don't choose. He was juxtaposing it with the opposite reality, which is, hey, I have no options. No one wants to hang out with me. I have no opportunities. In his mind, it was a good thing. But more and more,

I think we'd all agree we experience it as a negative. This is in part by social media because social media has a way of showing us pictures and video from the thing we didn't do, the concert we didn't go to, the community event we weren't present at. The pictures and video have a way of saying to us, you missed it.

You should have been there. Some people fight against this. They've coined a different term, Jomo, which is the joy of missing out. Maybe this is from the introverts. They're saying, hey, I'm glad I wasn't there. But even that is a little bit of sour grapes, right? It's like a way of psyching yourself up about the fact that you weren't at the event. You didn't have the experience. And of course, the concern is that moments of FOMO will lead to a life of FOMO.

At the end of our lives, we'll look back not on a life of what we did do, but of a life of what we didn't do. So if you wrestle with FOMO, how should we think about it as Christians? Well, a couple of things. One is, FOMO really reflects our origins as people who were created

to live forever. Ecclesiastes 3 says that God has written eternity on the hearts of all men. That's because we were made to live forever. We don't though, right? James 4 tells us life is like a vapor. We're here today and gone tomorrow. It's the

existential struggle of being made to live forever and yet, because of sin, knowing we're gonna die. So we have hearts that long to experience everything, to see and do everything, but those hearts live in bodies that only give us seven or eight decades at best. And so we feel this angst because of sin. But the gospel, of course, speaks to sin.

Jesus tells us in John chapter 10 that He's come to give us eternal life. That eternal life, by the way, culminates, we're told in Revelation 21, in the new heavens and the new earth where we will live forever with God. So the answer to FOMO is not to try to do everything. That's not sustainable financially, physically, emotionally, relationally. It just won't work.

The answer to FOMO is to choose boldly today, knowing that because of Jesus, His life, death, and resurrection, you will die, sure, but you'll rise from the dead and live forever on the earth made new with God. What you don't do in this life,

you'll get to there. If you don't get to Paris in this life, you'll see it in the new heavens and new earth. That's the joy of the Christian promise. We were made to live forever, and because of Jesus, we will. I can't help you with whether you should go out tonight, or what movie you should watch, or where you should go to eat, or if you should go at all, but I can tell you, eternity is full of opportunity.

to do the things that you didn't get to in this life. That's just another blessing that Jesus has won for you. This episode of Wake Up Look Up was produced by Marcus Cunningham and Hallie Andrews. Our topic researcher is Shanna Young. This episode was directed by Rima Saleh. Our podcast coordinator is Hallie Andrews. Our production manager and audio wizard is Marcus Cunningham.

with tech and engineering support from Matthew Adel and Landon Hall. I'm your host, Zach Weirach. Join us for the next episode of Wake Up Look.