Loving social media

I don't watch the news very often, and I don't even listen to it on the radio as much as I once did. It makes me too angry. I struggle with the way events are interpreted or misinterpreted to support an argument or pre-existing idea and I find it hard to know who to believe or trust.

In Jeremiah, God talks about the false prophets and ‘the lying pen of the scribes’ who falsely handle his word.

 

Very few people today are saying, ‘peace, peace’, where there is no peace. Quite the opposite. It seems to me a lot of people are saying, ‘fight, fight’ or ‘fear, fear’ or ‘hate, hate’. But is there any good reason to fight or fear or hate?

I don’t want to make a political point (at least, not party political). I want to explore how we represent our faith and our God in a world where it seems that only the loudest, most negative or extreme voices are heard.

Extreme opinions get reactions, good or bad. They get followers. Violence and negativity makes the news. Loving voices don’t. If we’re feeling brave, we could show our righteous anger like Jesus confronting the money changers in the temple. But I don’t know about you, I’m more tempted to retreat into my safe world and stop engaging with the shouty people at all.

Except they need to hear about God too.

Jeremiah told the people of Judah that they would be taken into captivity for many years. He insisted that was God’s plan, because they deserved that punishment. Unsurprisingly that was not what the people wanted to hear. He was beaten, arrested, imprisoned, vilified and finally taken into exile with his people. He was brave, and he had no choice. As he famously said, 

 

 I believe firmly that God’s word speaks a message of love and that we need to share it with a world that desperately needs to hear it. A world that needs to hear that blaming and whipping up hatred of strangers will not improve our lives. That fearing the unknown is not the path to peace and freedom from worry. That siding only with those who look or think like us will not lead to a fulfilling life.

These views, along with the importance of forgiveness and love, are fundamental to my fiction. On social media, I try to be positive, to share pictures that bring calm or contentment and book reviews that extol the positive sides of what I read. And I’m praying about whether I should be braver about communicating godly attitudes in a way that is attractive and attention-grabbing in the angry world of social media.