Observation: This is the voice of God's wisdom, personified as a woman calling out into busy streets. I don't often think of seeking wisdom and insight as a passionate endeavor, but Wisdom says we should "cry out" for it, and seek it like treasure.
Application: The phrase I've heard buzzing around for the last couple of years is we're a "post-truth society." With the dawn of social media, the quote often attributed to Mark Twain, that "a lie can make it halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," is especially relevant. And the icing on the cake: Mark Twain never even said that.
Let me go on record: I don't think we're a post-truth society. Sure, there are always a few folks out there who intentionally deceive, either for the sake political gain, or to gain notoriety, or just to cause chaos. But I think the vast majority of people really do want to know the truth. The trouble is, we're swimming upstream, and we're exhausted. Never in our lives has there been more information available to us instantaneously, and just wading through it, determining what's actually true, what's true but biased, and what's a flat-out lie, takes up much more of our bandwidth than ever before. We're not a post-truth society. We're a tired society, treading water in the midst of a strong current of anger and division, and we're tempted to just go with the flow.
Our spirits need to be revived. We need a space where we can trust one another enough to speak and hear the truth. Nobody is completely without bias: not even Christians; not even Christian leaders. We all see things the way we have been prepared to see them. But as a Christian community, we do "cry out for insight". We "raise our voice for understanding." We dig deeper than the twenty-four hour news cycle, and we look back further than the past week, or year, or election cycle. We know we're part of a bigger, and more hopeful and life-giving story than the one the world is telling, and others need to hear that story. That's the story we encounter in scripture and in worship. And whatever truth we think we know, we need to dig into that truth together. That's our solid ground, wherever else the currents go.
Prayer: God, we cry out for insight. We raise our voices for understanding. We need a deeper word than what we can find in the news or on Facebook or Twitter. Speak a word to us. Tell us the truth about who we are, and who you are.
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