I love using Twitter. Twitter for me is a man at a party carrying around an hors d'oeuvre tray. It provides light digestible thoughts without having to stop and take time for a full mental meal. I follow Greg Boyd, Bill Johnson, John Piper, and many others on Twitter. I get to read their condensed ideas without time spent following their train of thought through a book, essay, or even a blog post.
The downside of Twitter is that it provides quotable thoughts without context. It creates an environment where being quotable supersedes being fully thought out on subjects. The context that a tweet (or any quote for that matter) is birthed out of is essential to understanding it's true intended meaning. For example, "God often offends our mind to reveal our heart" is a phrase that I have heard quotes probably hundreds of times. After being repeated so often without context that can lead someone to assume that our thinking is a detriment to a full spiritual life. In a fuller context it can be explained that our response to the supernatural (when God does things outside of what we can understand) could be an indicator of our heart condition. Unfortunately that quote has been used to paint a picture of a false rivalry between head and heart in Christians.
In the pages of the writings of great spiritual thinkers there are many quotable gems to be found. I love reading those gems on Twitter as the authors or their readers post them. However I am sensing a need in myself to go beyond the surface and get a better context from which those gems came. If I am quotable; great. If I am fully thought out; better.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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