James and social media

My dear brothers and sisters, understand this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, for human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness.” (James 1:19-20)

When I read these words, I thought about our uses of social media.

Recently throughout the world, but especially in the U.S., we’ve been hearing a lot of horrific news.

And when we read these things, or we read people’s opinions on these things, it’s easy to get angry and think, “I’ve got to respond to this on social media!”

But when we use social media, we should heed James’s words. Do we know all the facts? And where is our anger coming from? Is our anger accomplishing God’s righteousness?

For that matter, are our words and our anger actually accomplishing anything at all?

Before posting things on SNS, we should think about such things.

That includes me, by the way.

We should also think about these things when it comes to email. Sometimes we receive emails that make us angry, and we need to think very carefully about how we respond.

99.9999% of the time, email is not the way to respond. Rather, we should talk to that person directly.

So when it comes to social media and email, let’s be careful.