Good morning…
When our freshman at Ole Miss was recently home for a long weekend, she was working on a paper about the “self-reference effect,” a phenomenon of memory that causes an individual to integrate an experience differently depending on their own degree of personal involvement with the art, the person, the event itself. Media is a mediator, a go-between, and if we live off secondhand reports of reality rather than experiencing truth ourselves, our integration of the experience is tainted, watered down, manipulated by the mediator’s interpretation. At least this is what my daughter and I could decipher from the plethora of pages, each filled with a sea of words, article after article, all difficult for our dyslexic brains to comprehend.
Since the God-given wiring for both my daughter and my self lives by the motto, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” my mother/daughter learning came to clarity as I saw this picture and short article in the headline news on Monday morning, 2.22.16. Touch this link and then return back to this page. This image of Mark Zuckerberg says so much about our future
Fortunately Mark Zuckerberg is not the God of our universe. God’s ways are not the worlds ways, thank goodness! God says, “Touch and taste, see and smell, experience my goodness firsthand.” The world gives us media, technology, couch potato options that keep us from getting outside, breathing in fresh air, experiencing for ourselves the good gifts of our Creator. At some point, the men in this picture, hidden behind these insular masks of secondhand experiences will feel so disconnected from their true selves and their true God that they will shed their man made gods in search of the One who offers all of us joy, meaning, and abundance of life. Through prolonged disconnection from our original design, fitting in with the brainwashed crowd is eventually exposed as hollow, our facade is stripped away, and we realize we need God to live, to breathe, to thrive.
Too often we settle for secondhand rumors about God for a while, until we really need the LORD to get through our day. Like the biblical character Job, who struggled with the LORD personally through extreme hardship, surviving with God we say with confidence: I admit I once lived by rumors of you; now I have it all firsthand—from my own eyes and ears! Job 42:5 (MSG),
Sue
