“An honest witness does not deceive…” Proverbs 14:5
Amen! That’s the truth! Wave a hankie at that, right?! But stop…think on this a minute and let’s search our hearts.
To deceive is:
- to cause someone to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain some personal advantage
- to give a mistaken impression
- to fail to admit to oneself that something is true
Filters. I’m not against them. Nothing wrong with adding a little brightness and contrast to your photos (Gingham is one of my favorites, by the way). But, come on people! Filters have gone to a whole new level! You can use filters that slim your face, smooth your skin, plump your lips and elongate your jaw. This goes way past brightness and contrast to a complete distortion of the person’s image and of the truth.
Deeper still, when this mentality of “filtering” bleeds over into our daily lives and our personal experiences, it can very easily turn into deceit.
My husband and I recently took a trip to the Dominican Republic to celebrate our anniversary. One afternoon, we were laying out on the beach enjoying one of our favorite pastimes – people watching! We saw a young girl on the beach picking up trash – a noble thing. She would take a picture of the item before she picked it up. She came to a plastic bottle that had washed up onshore. It was entangled in seaweed. She snapped a picture of it and then looked at the image on her phone. She reached down and meticulously arranged the seaweed around the bottle. She was not satisfied with how “bad” the picture looked the first time, so she arranged things to make it look worse so that the picture would work with her instagram caption.
If you have to “arrange” the facts about anything to caption your “snapshot”, it may not be the truth! Be careful! Walk in truth. Live your life unfiltered!
Written by
Kristine Morgan