I’ve been struggling a bit lately. I’ve taken to reading through posts on X and I’m caught between whether to keep going or to delete my account entirely (which is apparently the only way to log off if you don’t have the discipline to stop yourself from checking in during moments of boredom). The struggle comes in from finding some really good material there. I recently stumbled upon a wonderful thread that featured the most beautiful churches in each of the 50 states (Holy Hill in Wisconsin — one of the most beautiful), and these gems are not entirely uncommon.

But there’s also a lot of garbage, and I’ve read through some of it just to ponder the state of humanity in general. We like to think that places like X aren’t the norm…and they aren’t in some respects. Our Trump- (or Harris-, or Biden-, or…) loving neighbors are actually quite normal and in many cases wonderful people. They’re not the ones posting their joy over a guy being executed on the streets of New York City. They’re not the ones hurling insults and slurs as the first response to perfectly reasonable positions.
But maybe they are. The thing about social media — especially when its users can hide behind a web of diversion and anonymity — is that it also tends to reflect (and amplify) what people might actually be thinking. I mean, sure, murder is going too far…but didn’t that guy cheat some hard-working people out of their money last year? Maybe in a way he had it coming.
Most often though, I think what you see on platforms like X is people making outrageous claims and accusations because that’s where the money is. I’ve learned a bit of the art of avoiding some pretty subtle tricks. Like the one-line statement of subjective judgement followed by “I’ll start” that most often reads along the lines of “Best-looking dog in a starring role…I’ll start” followed by a picture of whatever. This gets crowds of people clicking on the post and adding their own opinions and pictures. Then of course, there’s the far worse hyperbolic lie (examples of which I won’t repeat here), garnering the clicks of thousands upon thousands of outraged (and supportive) citizens.
Or how about this: headlines that say something like “Blockbuster trade nets this $300 million superstar for [insert your team’s name here (the algorithm knows it)]!” You know what happens when you click on that headline? You get someone saying, “If the [team] were to trade player x for player y, that’d be really cool.” Didn’t take me too long to figure that deception out, but they still got a couple of clicks out of me on the way.
So over the past few days, I’ve been reading through the book of Proverbs in the morning, and being in this state of mind, Proverbs 10:32 jumped out at me so much that I took the time to memorize it:
“The lips of the righteous know what is acceptable, but the mouth of the wicked, what is perverse.”
Nailed it. But the next day I come upon Proverbs 15:28:
“The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer, but the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things.”
Two absolutely profound truths among the many you can find in the book, and even more so in today’s environment of blatant lies. Christians know there is an undercurrent of evil in the world. Our belief in the supernatural allows us to recognize it more readily than others. When you see a public figure, for example — someone who should know better and has access to the correct information — speak an obvious and easily provable lie and then double down when confronted, you have no recourse but to believe he’s being guided by an evil of some kind (and that evil more than likely from within his own heart). This is where I’m caught. I look at X as a means to gauge the depravity of man and reassure me of the veracity of my beliefs — the belief that “the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately sick (Jer 17:9).” I suppose though that it would do me well to heed the last line of that verse: “who can understand it?”
Yes. Who can understand it? So should we try or should we just know it and move on? I think we should try and move on. And to do that, whether you’re a bible-believing Christian (or Jew in this case) or not, you really couldn’t go wrong reading and reflecting on the book of Proverbs. In it, there is so much wisdom it can’t help but make you a better, more thoughtful person. And if you actually take action upon that which you ponder, you could certainly understand this world better, even if you often can’t understand its people.