Does
everyone’s browser throw “articles of interest” in front of your faces all day?
When there’s no real news, there are always those magnetic headlines.
“She’s 83
and she looks so different now.” Really? Because the rest of us don’t look different
at 83 than we did at 17? Or maybe she looks different from everyone else. (As
we all do.) The missing ingredient would be the object of the missing
preposition “from.” So far, I’ve never been interested enough to take the bait
and find out.
Then there’s,
“Dog has adorable reaction to learning he’s being adopted.” Sheesh. Even smart
dogs don’t know the meaning of “adopted,” at least, not before the fact. And,
to dog lovers, dogs have an “adorable reaction” to everything. Except ammonia.
Don’t ask me how I know. (For the record, it wasn’t me.)
Particularly
irritating to me is, “You’re cooking eggs/treating hair/shopping for batteries
all wrong.” Just exactly who has the authority to criticize my
cooking/treating/shopping methods? I’ve lived a few decades on this planet; why
do “they” think I don’t know how to cook eggs? No, I don’t check on these, just
to find out. Why would I let those young punks beat me up?
The Bible
has a lot of catchy leading lines, but none of them is clickbait. God knows how
to get people’s attention.
When Jesus
said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among
robbers,” he had the attention of his challengers. They all knew this was a
dangerous trek. But when He tossed in the word, “Samaritan,” their whole
attitude lit up with emotion. We associate “Samaritan” with “good,” but they
all had strong opposite responses. They thought, “sinner,” “scum,” “disgusting”
and worse. Jesus had their complete focus, and he taught them a principle they
accepted only grudgingly, because they couldn’t logically avoid it, at least in
public.
In Acts 17
we read, from the apostle Paul, “Men of Athens, while I was passing through and
examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this
inscription, ‘ TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’
Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” He had them.
Immediately prior, we had been told, “All the Athenians and the strangers
visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or
hearing something new. So Paul…” He didn’t have to entice his listeners with
nonsense. The relevance of his words to their lives gave him a wide open
opportunity to present one of the most electrifying and comprehensive altar
calls in history. Some believed; some wanted to hear more.
A dear
friend, when she was not a believer and was asking questions about God, was
advised, “Read the Bible.” She began at the beginning, of course, and part way
through Genesis, the message reached her -- she understood that God was real and
cared about her. Her life was changed and she has been active in changing
others’ hearts ever since. “Read the Bible” was not just cheap marketing; it
was eternally effective advice.
Everything
in the Bible is something God wanted us to know. While a great deal of it is
intriguing, shocking, puzzling, annoying or otherwise attention-getting, not a
word is worthless drivel, hollow sensationalism or clickbait. There’s real
substance there. In John 6, Jesus told his disciples, “The Spirit gives life;
the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you – they are full of
the Spirit and life.”
--Lynda Shenefield
Thank you, Lynda. I look forward to reading your posts. Always something I can apply to my life today.
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