The oldest cure for doomscrolling in one lyric

For nearly 20 years, the same sentence has greeted me every morning.

It first appeared on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the door of my office in Nashville. When my wife and I moved to Montana, the note came with us. Eventually, the paper curled and the ink faded, so my wife had the words beautifully rendered in calligraphy and framed.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man.

Today, they hang on the wall in my office, where I see them before I begin each day’s work.

The sentence comes from Catherine Winkworth’s 19th-century translation of Joachim Neander’s 17th-century hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love