Thought it was about to link up with the Five Minute Friday crew at Kate’s place (http://katemotaung.com/2016/03/03/five-minute-friday-news/). After all, it is Saturday.

The five minute prompt this week is NEWS, prompted by the good news (??, a double edged sword??)  Kate has signed a book contract and is now swamped with edits and revisions. Go Kate!

So, in answer to the pondering questions she posed — and which all writers ultimately face — “Who really cares? And what’s the point?”  and her {our} answer, “We press on, because deep down we believe it’s worth it,” here’s my weekly contribution. The timer is set, my tongue is firmly lodged in my cheek and my fingers anxiously await instructions from my wandering mind, so let’s GO …

This should be my bailiwick. After all, for the past half century or so I’ve been in the news gathering and dissemination field. But it really isn’t. It’s more complex that just putting a string of words together.

We all have news to share … good news, bad news just pain ordinary information {news} to share. Sometimes people are interested, other times, not so much. But we all have a story to tell and news gatherers recognize that. Some of you may remember the concluding line from the old TV series The Naked City  … There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

That’s why we write.

I often thought about news reporting in ancient times. No, I’m not talking about when I started in this crazy business, but waaaay before that … like in the time of Jesus.

We have news reports from Matt, Mark, Luke and John, but, like yesteryear’s reruns, they sometimes get lost in translation. We weren’t there. We’re not accustomed to the norms of the day. We can’t understand the psyche of the contemporaries of the day. And we certainly can’t understand the motives behind their writing. They had a purpose. They had an audience that has stretched from … STOP

… their time to ours — and they lost some people along the way.

We’re not the same audience. We live in a different time and sometimes it’s hard to relate. Their writing was a compilation of events explaining this phenomenon of Christianity as a way of sifting the fact from the fiction.

I often thought it would be a challenge to write Christ’s story from a news perspective … you know, like a reporter for the Israel Daily News. I can envision a “report” of the star over Bethlehem, some of the events in Jesus’ life, His final days, the empty tomb, reactions from the people He touched. And all of this presented as a “news” chronicle of the life and times of Jesus.

I don’t know, maybe some non-believers or skeptics might be actually read it. What do you think?

THOUGHT TO REMEMBER: What others think of you – is NONE of your business. It’s how much you value yourself and how important you think you are.