“Social media sites offer quick and easy ways to share ideas, crack jokes, find old friends. They can make us feel part of something big and wonderful and fast-moving. But the things we post don’t go away. And they can come back to haunt us.” (From the “Hidden Brain” podcast introduction to a great posting by Shankar Vedantam, which you may read of list to at https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/you-cant-hit-unsend/, accessed 03-18-2022.)

I love Shankar Vedantam’s podcasts called “Hidden Brain.” Today’s post made me cry, but it also made me think.

It was about a young man who had been admitted to Harvard. He sounds like a really fine young man. But he made a very bad decision. He was part of a group of incoming freshmen who sent out some really racist and sexually offensive memes. The entire group had their invitations to Harvard withdrawn.

He does not come across as evil. Quite the contrary. He was just a young man who made some really bad decisions in order to fit in. These bad decisions cost him Harvard. It cost him more than that. Of seventeen schools that he applied to afterwards, he was turned down by fifteen. He was waitlisted at three schools.

But he kept trying. One of universities for which he was waitlisted said that they had a slot for William. He and his dad rushed to the university. Here is the transcript from the Hidden Brain podcast about what happened next. (Jeffrey is William’s dad. Vedantam is, of course, the interviewer.)

“JEFFREY: We were wandering around, and there was something about an open house, and it turned out, we’d missed it. And so I was very disappointed. And then this professor just wandered in and said, can I help you? He looked like he was picking up something from a printer. And we said, well, we’re visiting and William has to decide by 5 o’clock. And he said, please, come to my office. So we went to his office, and I just sat there, too, with them. He and William had this wonderful conversation about physics and music and all kinds of things for about an hour. And it was just an amazing conversation. I was very impressed. He was giving us so much of his time.

And then the moment that I’ll never forget was, at one point, he just gets out of his chair, he gets down on one knee, he puts his hands together and he says, please, come here. And then he just got back in his seat and kept on talking. And I thought, oh, my God, that is the sweetest, most wonderful thing in this whole year. I mean, God, I’m starting to tear up now. But I just – it was amazing. I love that guy.

And I thought, you know, when I get back home, I’m going to write the chair of the physics department, and I’m going to say what a wonderful professor that guy was. And I got home, looked up who this guy was, and that was the chair of the physics department. I said, oh, my God, you know, what a wonderful place. So anyway, as you can tell, I don’t think I’ve gotten emotional about this since then, but I just want to thank that professor.

VEDANTAM: And what do you think is evoking this feeling in you? What do you think that professor was doing? What was he communicating to William that makes you so moved?

JEFFREY: He was being good to my son.”

I have made my own share of really bad choices. I’ve lost more than Harvard. I’ve lost my family, some friends, my self-respect, and a calling that I had come to love. The greatest loss of all was my own better self. I’ve spent the last nineteen years trying to recover that better self. By God’s grace, I’ve made great progress, but Shankar Vedantam is absolutely right: You can’t hit unsend—or un-sin.

The story goes that God had a bunch of sons and daughters who had made terrible choices. They had forfeited more than a shot at attending Harvard University. They had forfeited their souls.

But that’s not the end of the story. The story says that God didn’t give up on his children. He came to earth, in the form of his own Son, to redeem his lost sons and daughters. And his Son didn’t get down on his knee. No, he did not. Instead, he went to the cross.

Ya gotta love a God who would do that.