Diver And Great White Sharks By James Thew/stock.adobe.com
Pity Taylor Swift.
Not only did her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, lose in the Super Bowl, but she has lost over 144,200 Instagram followers since being mercilessly booed at the game. However, the wife of her boyfriend’s brother recently expressed “how much I love and appreciate [Taylor] and how much I love the fact that you can tell how happy Trav is. And that’s what I care about.”
I doubt Taylor Swift cares what her lost Instagram followers think of her, but I suspect she cares greatly about Kylie Kelce’s thoughts.
From social media attacks to shark attacks: a man who miraculously survived his encounter with a nine-foot-long bull shark has formed a support group to help others who have had life-threatening run-ins with apex predators. Dave Pearson was surfing with some friends back in 2011 when the shark attacked him, shredding his forearm, wrist, and thumb.
He experienced isolation and trauma over the incident, along with online bullying from people who were unmoved by his ordeal. As a result, Pearson founded a Facebook group called Bite Club. Now with over five hundred members, it is for people who have survived attacks from crocodiles, lions, hippos, and other apex predators.
“The world is right now in an identity crisis”
We were made for God and for each other, which is why loving our Lord and loving our neighbor summarizes God’s word and will (Matthew 22:37–39). However, as our ministry’s online devotional First15 notes:
The world is right now in an identity crisis. With the global rise of social media and the internet, we can now project ourselves to the world as anything we want. We’ve been given the option of only being partly known by countless people rather than really known by a few. We can attempt to fill a gap in our souls for love and relationship with the online world rather than being fully known in our strengths and weaknesses, our greatest faults and soaring successes. We’re in need of an awakening of honesty.
Social media merely exacerbates this tendency from the Fall to today: we hide from God and from others because we are ashamed of who we know ourselves to be (cf. Genesis 3:8). As the writer John Powell noted, I am afraid to tell you who I really am because I’m afraid you won’t like me if I do.
Such fear was a very real fact of my life for much of my childhood. My father had a severe heart attack when I was two years old and was physically restricted for the rest of his life. As a result, he couldn’t teach my brother and me how to throw a baseball or shoot a basketball.
Consequently, when school playground teams were chosen, I was usually chosen last. It didn’t help that I was usually the best student in my class; boys in my community were judged not by their grades but by their athletic prowess.
And so I grew up with a sense of inferiority that is still part of my psychological “wiring” today. I compensated by trying to be who I thought others wanted me to be, all the while living in fear that they would discover the truth.
When I was invited to church at the age of fifteen and subsequently became a Christian, for the first time I found a social group that accepted me for who I was. This was not because they were less human than others; it was because we shared a common relationship with a God who knows us precisely as we are and loves us anyway.
My youth group became my “Bite Club.” In a very secularized high school, we looked out for each other and did life together. I cannot think of much the world needs more than such a “Club” today.
What “creates a whole new story”
The key is to see ourselves and each other as God sees us.
In Exodus 3, God called from a burning bush, “Moses, Moses!” (v. 4). In response, “Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (v. 6). But the Lord assured him that he knew the suffering of his people (v. 7) and had a plan for their flourishing (vv. 8–9). He had a transcendent purpose for Moses as the one who would bring his people out of Egypt (v. 10). He would give Moses all he needed to fulfill this historic calling, from a miraculous staff (Exodus 4:1–5) to a transformed hand (vv. 6–9) to a brother who would speak for and with him (vv. 14–17).
What was true of Moses was true of Aaron as well: God knew his name, his abilities, his location, and his heart (v. 14). When they created a purpose-driven bond in faith, the result was a community forged by the God of the universe whose story would change human history.
These brothers’ story is in God’s word so it can become our story. Think of it: the God of the universe knows your name and everything about you. He has a plan to use your life for eternal significance in this world and the next (cf. Jeremiah 29:11; Romans 12:2). He loves you not because you are worthy of his love but because “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Consequently, your Father loves you as much as he loves his own Son (John 17:23, 26).
The key is to listen for his call and to trust his grace.
Br. Curtis Almquist of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston observed:
For more than two thousand years, people have heard the same gospel stories. The only thing new or different is what’s going on for us, the hearers of the story. God’s revelation to us will be a kind of synergy between what is going on with a very old scriptural story, and what is going on today in our own heart and imagination. And that creates a whole new story.
Will you experience “a whole new story” today
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