Crucified Hearts

The following is a copy of a comment I made on Facebook in reply to someone’s suggestion that our postings help raise awareness of a particular cause:

“Yes, I agree. I’m only modifying the idea of raising awareness in social media with this truism: “Just because we dip our finger in the ocean all of the fish don’t know it”. As with the widows mite, or a story of Jesus asking a despised woman for a drink of water, it is the attention that the Holy Spirit gives to the account, the way God favors the act with his blessing that sends it on through space and time with saving power.

In simply human terms, even when a social media post or video goes “viral”, the numbers may not reflect the actual influence in real time. This is especially true with the nature of our extremely short attention spans.

The medium is the message. And this particular medium degrades thought as much as it might inspire it. Social media obfuscates the truth as much as it proclaims it. We live in a postmodern time when one thing can mean anything. All definition is being lost in the flood of relativity. And the entertainment value of what is shared has greater significance than any truth it might try to tell. That is why the algorithms of social media support conflict and polarization. We are deceived by the appearance of unity in our social media feeds. Birds of a feather have not so much flocked together as have been herded into their cages by the algorithms. Therefore, our little postings seldom get outside the boundaries of the room we have all crowded into.

Too, when one is drowning in a flood there is very little discernment in what we grasp to keep afloat. We are drowning in a flood of information as I’m sure you agree.

My main point, in offering the obvious, is to not overestimate our reach, our sphere of influence with social media, not to think that we have made a great impact or done a great thing or had a great influence with our words, etc.

Pictures of cute kittens, cavorting goats, and the like far exceed the reasoned Word within social media’s sphere of influence. Proof of this could be found in a survey of those websites that are defined as “influencers.” Trivia and banality take on infinite proportions.

But I don’t despair. What is impossible with man is possible with God. We do indeed sow this tiniest of seed with the promise that God will give the increase.

I believe we are entering that time when the voice of God in Scripture, like humanity itself, will be as rare as the gold of Ophir.

“I will punish the world for its evil,
and the wicked for their iniquity;
I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant,
and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless.
I will make people more rare than fine gold,
and mankind than the gold of Ophir.
Therefore I will make the heavens tremble,
and the earth will be shaken out of its place,
at the wrath of the LORD of hosts
in the day of his fierce anger.”
— Isaiah 13:11-13

“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord GOD,
“when I will send a famine on the land⁠—
not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the LORD.
They shall wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the LORD,
but they shall not find it.”
— Amos 8:11-12

Postscript:

Those familiar with media studies and media criticism will recognize Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman in McLuhan’s dictum: The medium is the message.

I highly recommend Neil Postman’s two books, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and his prophetic vision from the 1990s, “Technopally”. Oh, that he had lived to see this day!

I agree with those thinkers who say that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” has superseded George Orwell’s 1984 in defining humanity as a victim drowning in a flood of insignificance, brought on by the imagined advances of technology’s religion and the worship of it.