Flooding or Floundering. How are we living up to the invitation of Elder Bednar?

     Through an apostolic invitation, Elder Bednar urged us all to, 'sweep the earth as with a flood through social media.'  We've seen the efforts of the church to use technology as a tool to spread our beliefs to every corner of the earth with swipes, clicks, shares and hash-tags.  Now we've been asked as members to further that work through our own efforts and to use our personal accounts as tools, potentially reaching millions and in a collaborative effort to flood the earth with our good and happy teachings and messages of hope.  How have we fared?

We are given guidelines from Elder Bednar, the four points are as follows:

1. Be authentic and consistent.
2. Edify and uplift.
3. Respect Intellectual Property.
4. Be wise and vigilant.

So essentially, the four ways we can go wrong with this is invitation is to:

1. Share because everyone else is doing it and we want to fit in.
2. Complain about the barrage of spiritual posts now filling your feed.
3. Steal photos or music to use in your post to promote Christ's teachings.
4. Attack those who may give rebutting statements to your post.

     Probably 80% of my feed are posts from members of the LDS church, so I scrolled through a couple hundred to see what I found.  Keep in mind, it's only been two days since general conference has ended and I expected to see inspirational quotes in cute fonts and photos of everyone's conference experiences.  There were three posts which contained any sort of church material.  One was an article on the passing of Elder Hales and another was a comedic post in which it appeared President Eyring called up Elder 'John Cena' after which several short clips of the famous WWE wrestler appeared.  The third post I found encompassed all of Elder Bednar's guiding points and I felt no better way to explain it then to share it with you here.

CLICK ON THE LINK TO WATCH VIDEO!!!!

https://www.facebook.com/tinymusician/videos/1926388674044785/

For those not patient enough to follow a link out of this blog, here is a video of the same little girls sharing her gifts through song.




When we can use our talents to share our sincere beliefs, then we will truly transcend borders and speak to the hearts of our brothers and sisters to share the love of our Savior, Jesus Christ. 

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 9, 2017 at 4:01 PM

    That's a great analysis of Bednar's talk. I really liked how you mentioned four ways that we can go wrong. I agree with you in the fact that from a day to day basis there are very few religious posts to be found.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mandi MansfieldNovember 24, 2017 at 9:29 AM

    Love the video you linked and love the 4 ways you listed how we could go wrong. When your surrounded by the church it's easy to do things because it's what everyone else is doing, but we need to do things because of our hearts, not for social gain.

    ReplyDelete

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