A Squealing Recorder

Facebook reminded me today of a post from two years ago. I had written that my young neighbor, probably a second or third grader, had come home with a recorder. You know the ones: made of plastic with holes in the top that can make beautiful music.

If you play it properly.

If you don't, it squeals. Oh, how it squeals!

I think our social media posts are sometimes like that. Social media can be a wonderful thing. A beautiful tool. If we use it properly.

Unfortunately, we clog it up with negative posts, rants, and the obligatory political post that attracts trolls and blow flies.

The answer is simple. 1 Corinthians 13: 1-3 says, "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing." Simply put: we need to speak with love.

In person, on the phone, and on social media.

But simple doesn't mean easy. A traditional chocolate mouse recipe is simple. It only has four ingredients. But for anyone who has tried to make it, it's not easy. The conditions have to be just right: absolutely clean bowl and beaters, chilled cream, melted chocolate that's not too hot. If any of these is not quite right, you end up with inedible goop.

Sharing only beauty and love on social media is a never-ending guard duty rotation in a torrential rain. But it can be done. It must be done! The world has Christianity under a microscope like never before. Every squeal of the recorder is one more reason they will always say the recorder is a horrible instrument, fit for neither man nor beast. Only love will change their minds.

By the way, in only three short weeks of dedicated practice, my little neighbored mastered that recorder. By Thanksgiving, she was playing beautiful music.