Four in ten people now avoid the news, and it isn't apathy.

Something quietly strange is happening: more and more people are turning the news off. By one large survey, more than four in ten of us now avoid it, at least some of the time, the highest number on record. It is not that we stopped caring. It is that we cannot hold it. A psychologist put it plainly this week: the human brain was built to track threats in a village, and now it is handed every war, every disaster, every cruelty on the planet before breakfast. The wiring that once kept us alive mostly just exhausts us now.

There is a line from Jesus that sounds almost too small for a problem this size, until you sit with it. In the Sermon on the Mount he tells a worried crowd to let tomorrow look after itself, and adds a strange little mercy: each day has enough trouble of its own. The line is about size. You were only ever asked to carry one day's weight at a time, and tomorrow's troubles can wait for tomorrow to be carried.

That is permission most of us never give ourselves. The grief of the whole world, all at once, was never your assignment. Today's trouble is your share, and it turns out that is allowed to be enough.

None of this is a case for looking away. The point was never to care less, and the psychologist behind the research is blunt that switching the news off completely is its own kind of failure, because a society still needs people who know what is happening.

Caring and carrying are different things, though. You can love a world you are unable to hold all at once. You can probably only love it well once you stop trying, because the person actually in front of you needs a heart that is not already underwater. The whole earth's grief was God's to carry. The piece of it within your reach today is yours, and that piece is the only one you were ever going to be able to lift.