Devotional Messages

DEVOTIONAL MESSAGE

Proverbs 12:22 – Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight.  (NRSV)

I was hoping we would never have to have this conversation, but the wolves have come almost up to our door!  If you have ever received an email from our friend Pastor Kindra over at Missiongathering, you may have gotten one this morning, inviting you to sign a document “she” had prepared for you.  Except she didn’t.  Instead, someone hacked into her email and used it for nefarious purposes to draw even more people into a web of deceit.

It’s sad, but we now live in a time when we always need to keep some level of skepticism about what we read, especially in our emails.  If something seems surprising or off, it probably is.  If you weren’t expecting to be sent a document to sign, don’t click on anything inviting you to do so.  First, check with the person who supposedly sent it to you to see if it’s real; chances are high that it isn’t.

Even sadder than a basic hack trying to harvest information, there is a scam that’s been going around, specifically targeting church communities.  People throughout the congregation will receive an email pretending to be from the pastor, asking them to send electronic gift cards in reply to that email.  Such emails may ask you to be discrete about it, as if to keep the need for the gift cards out of the public eye.  But it’s not the pastor asking for those gift cards – it’s a scammer who somehow got a hold of the church’s directory!

Often, you can doublecheck the address such emails come from and see that it’s not the pastor’s actual email.  Sometimes they will include language that doesn’t sound like your pastor.  For instance, if you got something purporting to be from me, but the sign-off was “In His Hands” or “For Christ the King” you would notice something was wrong, right?

The best guidance is to always be aware that hackers exist, even if we’ll never understand why anyone would choose to live that way.  You know your pastor; you know your church friends.  If something seems off, reach out through another medium (call, text) and ask.  Any of us can accidentally send an email that sounds suspiciously generic once in a while, but if you check, then you’ll know for sure and we can both have a laugh!