I was cruising Facebook yesterday, since my Facebook Free February ended and I’m now once again released to waste precious time scanning thru a myriad of rants, tirades, and general garbage looking for my “friends” accounts of family activities, good news, cat videos and happy puppy pictures. Ok, that was a long opening sentence.  Anyway, there was a photo of an 18-wheeler in a crash with a pickup truck. There we 10, 20, 30, 100 comments about not cutting off 18-wheelers on the freeway, hence they crush you.  One guy posted, “I call B.S.” with an explanation of what he thought the accident would really look like.

For some reason, I smiled and felt a small sense of joy at, “I call B.S.”

This led me to spending the last day calling B.S. in my head to numerous Facebook posts, more than a few news reports, a couple texts and even in the middle of one or two conversations. Albeit, I kept it in my head, it was an interesting social experiment.  How often each day do you hear/read something that most likely is just not true, or not entirely factual, or not authentic, or pure fantasy/delusion?

There was a guy who wandered into my office every couple days and would stand and share his importance to the organization. What he did or didn’t do, authorized or stopped, was responsible for or wasn’t. I’d listen with a slight smile, but more often or not my brain was saying, “I call B.S. – you are just self-important, which equates to insecure.” I never did call him out.

So, I have to wonder, have we become a society that is more than comfortable with a degree of falsehoods laced into everything we do, say, read? Have the “little white lies” of our parent’s generation become foundational to our conversations and communication?

What if we call B.S.? What if we became a society that demands truth? The bible doesn’t say big lies are bad, but fibs, white lies, half-truths are ok.

What does the Bible says about lying? Well, Proverbs 6:16-19 says a lying tongue is not only something God hates, but it’s something that is an abomination to Him. And just for sport:

a·bom·i·na·tion – a thing that causes disgust or hatred. That’s pretty bad.

Yikes! Hard to think that stretch of the truth to cover my backside grieves the heart of God. But it does. So how do we stop it?  Call B.S.  We need to recognize it, not buy in and become part of it, call it out in ones we love and, above all else, call it out for ourselves. Give others permission to call it out in us. We are grieving God’s heart by accepting untruths as commonplace, as normal. Instead we need to recognize it, resist it and call it into the light. At a minimum with ourselves.

A survey done recently determined that 80% of Americans were dishonest in some way. Some questions asked were:

• Do you cheat on your Income Tax Return? (timely!)
• Do you tell your spouse to tell callers you are not at home when you are there?
• Do you tell “little white lies” if it will keep you out of trouble?
• Do you shave truth here and there in business situations?
• Do you tell creditors that “the check is in the mail” when you have not yet mailed it?
• Do you exaggerate in repeating things you have heard?

It’s really quite simple. Truth is truth. Dishonestly in any form is dishonesty. Let your yes be yes, and your no be no. Yes, our sin nature will lean towards those little untruths or exaggerations. But we need to stand in our truth. Stand against the barrage of untruth daily coming at us and call B.S. when warranted.  The more we chase the light, the more light we get.

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