Purified Seven Times

¹“The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.” (Psalms 12:6). A phrase that has been attributed to Mark Twain and Winston Churchill but possibly belongs to neither goes something like “a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” With the technology available today, a lie can travel halfway around the world even before the mind itself has got its boots on. It is so easy for us to say the first words that pop into our mouths, and to equally thoughtlessly like and share and repost the words of others. There is no investigation into the veracity or the accuracy of anyone's statements. The more informatory the language, and thus usually the more dishonest and untruthful, the faster it gets spread around. But can we imagine what public discourse would be like if all of our words were pure? The words of the Lord are purified like silver in the furnace seven times. Seven times! What if every time we tried to post something online, we had to get it proofread and fact checked seven times? For one thing, if we had to write seven different drafts, a lot of the silly and petty and mean things would disappear because it would just take too much effort for something that ultimately had no value. Lies, too, would burn away like dross. Can we imagine being cross examined seven different ways in our lies? There's no way that they would be able to hold up under such searing scrutiny. In today's world of lies and hypocrisy and cruelty, we need to give truth enough time to not only get its boots on but its breastplate and helmet and shield. I know we don't always have the time or the energy to purify our words seven times, but our lives would be so much better if we tried to make our words as pure as we can.