For Wilshire Baptist Church
For the past week I’ve been unpacking and tweaking an idea that I thought I would drop today. My goal was that if it resonated and went viral or at least trended I might get some traction and maybe crush the conversation and grow my platform. But it wasn’t in my wheelhouse and in fact was above my pay grade so I decided to shelf it. I didn’t want an epic fail that would get trolled and shaded with LOL or SMH and especially not LMAO or WTF.
Did reading that paragraph sort of make you sick to your stomach? I got nauseous writing it. That’s the language we speak today; that’s the world we live in now. Everybody’s working hard to out-do, one-up and best each other with click bait to blow up the Internet. And what’s the prize? A rush of likes, friends and followers, usually for just a few minutes before the shamers jump in and drag you down into the digital gutter.
I don’t know if it’s solely technology driven or the sad, soulless evolution of our language and our sensibility. It may be both, but it’s everywhere and it’s making us sick — more so than climate change, politics, guns, violence, disease, hunger and all the ills of the world combined. It takes those serious problems that need real solutions and squeezes them down into topics to be debated and spun with 120 characters or less. Finding solutions is less important than generating clicks. Short of the Internet going dark forever, I don’t see any way out but one:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind . . . and love your neighbor as yourself.”
It’s not a bombshell; it’s a whisper. In this graceless, cutthroat age it reads like a cutesy slogan painted on a slab of wood at an antique mall. It’s milquetoast in the land of avenging superheroes. It’s too simple to be taken seriously. Really, we can change the tone and change the world with love for God and each other? Cue the laughing yellow emojis and the “no way” gifs.
Go ahead and shame me and shade me if you wish, but this simple statement of love has been trending quietly for thousands of years. Not just the words but the actions they generate. We see little examples every now and then on the late news – we’ve even seen waves at different times in history – but it’s never been tried by all of humanity at the same time.
I wish it would go viral but God doesn’t seem to work that way.