I’ve had a lot on my mind. It’s been difficult to put into words, but I really feel like it’s time. Let me introduce it this way…
“Lying lips are abomination to the Lord: but they that deal truly are his delight”, warns the author of Proverbs 12:22. Religious or not, I have little doubt that most of you prefer truth to falsehood. When making a decision, you want to have true data, correct insights, and logical conclusions at your disposal. And when it counts, if someone lied to you when you were counting on their telling the truth, you’d likely feel hurt.
Why? Because if you make the wrong decision, you could come to harm. And you don’t want that. Not for yourself, and not for those you care about. This is basic to the human experience. We intuitively know that false statements lead to harm, and if someone comes and feeds them to us, that person must be an enemy.
Every time I open my Facebook feed, pretty much all I see is people that I love and care fighting each other, or talking about each other (this phenomenon is well-studied; see this video by CGP Grey for an introduction). I’m not neutral in this either; I have very strong opinions about some topics, making it difficult to be charitable when they come up. It is pretty much just the memes that have any reward to them (thanks, Fuzzy!); the rest of it is just self-inflicted punishment, addictive like smoking, and probably almost as harmful.
Current events have now divided people further than they already were, and I’m at the point where I can no longer ignore it, for “Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin” (James 4:17). I must speak up, and therefore I have started writing here.
I have three goals for this blog:
- To start conversations, either with or without me. I partially want to remind you that I’m here (if you have my email or phone number, I’d love it if you’d drop me a line now and then), and if my insights have ever helped you in the past, I want you to know that I’m here for you now. But I’ve had a lot of heavy things weighing on my mind for the past several years, and I really need to bring them out into the open, to process them with you.
- To do my (small) part to fight falsehood, without fighting my friends and loved ones. There aren’t that many topics about which I’m qualified to write authoritatively, but I do have some qualities that will prove useful in this endeavor. I am open to interactions in this; I am not telling you the list of things you should believe. I expect there is a high probability that some of you will be able to change my mind on certain matters, but I would ask you to be open to the same.
- To break up the serious conversations by nerding out about topics that interest me, or by trying to have one of you teach me something I don’t know. This might not be your favorite, so I might have to turn it into a separate blog, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. But sometimes I need an outlet to go crazy about how much space excites me, and if you end up reading it, so much the better.
So if that sounds refreshing to you, I hope you’ll join me on this journey. We need each other, especially right now.