Tweeting is for the Birds, isn't it?

Did you hear that President Obama had a Twitter Town Hall on Wednesday? Tweeting has become the icon of word economy. “Tweeple,” people who “tweet” on Twitter, need to communicate in messages that are no more than 140 characters.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said it took him about an hour to write a one-hour speech, but two hours or more to do a 30-minute version. Henry David Thoreau said a story doesn’t need to be long, but it takes a long time to make it short. Mark Twain said if he had more time, he’d write shorter.

But surely these wordsmiths would have found the brevity of tweets and texts utterly contemptible. No, these short communiqués are not the product of thoughtful writing. Rather they are simply driven by a need for speed: quite the opposite of what Roosevelt, Thoreau, and Twain had in mind.

In these daily blog posts, I try to be concise without sacrificing depth. And though I hope my words are meaty enough to chew on for awhile, they cannot substitute for a healthy daily diet of The Word. In this day of texts and tweets, look at what Jesus said about words: “the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). Well, all this is to say, I think our President’s town hall twitter is a good time to reflect on the importance of God’s words, and be careful that we are not twittering away our daily talks with Him!