Anyone who has been on social media for any length of time has at least one friend who constantly posts very weird stuff. I personally have a couple of friends who will post links to bizarre alien conspiracy theories, reviews for some strange product on the market, or how robots are going to take over the world.

There are even now a couple of entire websites that specialize in satirical news and stories that have some great humor to them. I have a couple of other friends that I have silenced their posts or even blocked because they get a little too political on either side or just post too many strange things. Some of these are really funny, some are just downright scary, and the over the top political stuff just gets annoying, and some even go too far in their level of divisiveness, and I block it because I do not need that level of anger and hatred in my life.

I do have to admit, if I have a bit of free time, I will sometimes follow some of the click-bait to some story that is humorous or strange. There was a website I used to go to every once in a while, called News of the Weird. This was a collection of bizarre snippets of news, like a Russian man who stole an armored personnel carrier to go steal some wine or a Missouri man who stole some power transformers to build a time machine. We are sometimes fascinated by the strange things that happen in real life, just get a group of priests together and bring up the topic of strange weddings or funerals, truth is really stranger than fiction.

Something interesting is some of the strange things that happen in Holy Scripture and see the reaction of the people who were witnessing them. Just look at the miracles that Jesus performed; changing water into wine, driving out demons, curing the sick, raising the dead, and many other things. I can only imagine what would happen if video recording cell phones and social media was around when Jesus was doing these things. Could you imagine the posts that would have gone up?

The accounts of his miracles spread pretty fast for the time, in fact, it says that Jesus had a hard time finding solitude to pray because so many people were looking for him to either heal them or so that they could witness a miracle. One of the great things is that we have access to the material in Sacred Scripture and we can read about them again and again. It is kind of interesting that we have heard the accounts so many times that we sometimes do not take into account of how incredible these things really were.

So, instead of reading some strange thing that may or may not have happened, take some time to read some of these stranger-than-fiction accounts of the miracles that happened in the Bible and let them bring you closer to wonders of Christ.

Fr. Ken Halbur