I was going to say “tiny bits of truth” but then we would have had a conversation about partial truths. And that’s not what I mean. I mean taking a bit of truth and practicing it until you make it part of you.

Like the words that James offers about speech, about words, about the tongue. In part, he writes, “With [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, these things ought not to be so.”

It’s not complicated, this tiny bit of truth. The same people who would be horrified to say, “God is dumb” have no qualms about using the same words and worse to describe other people. The people that God talks about loving, the people that Jesus apparently gave up his life for.

James isn’t talking about agreeing or disagreeing. He’s talking about shaming them, about invoking the worst for them, about deriding them, about inviting ridicule, about reviling.

When we click “like”, we say something. When we lump people into groups instead of seeing people as named individuals created in the likeness of God, we risk missing that likeness, we risk defying God’s command to love one another. When we say, “fool”, when we mock people for their allegiances, when we summarize everything about a person with a cartoon about a group, we are unnaming the person.

So here’s a tiny bit of truth to practice this week. Bless the people you intersect with. Invite God’s blessing on the people you see in your facebook feed. Refrain from cursing the people you disagree with. Seek consistency between the way we speak of God and of others. Which probably means changing what we say about others more than what we say about God.