Maybe there a few people out there who have not heard the story of Manti Te'o, a Notre Dame linebacker and his girlfriend Lennay Kekua. Well here is Manti Te;os story, the condensed version. Three years ago Te'o met Kekua on Facebook and started to develop an online relationship with her.
As time passed their relationship grew stronger. Then in his junior season soon after Te'o played in the Purdue game, the two became inseparable over the phone following a car accident in which Kekua was reportedly involved. It was during her treatment for the car accident when Kekua found out she had leukemia. Over the next few months she had a bone marrow transplant but sadly the disease took her life in September of 2012.
The whole affair sounds like the plot for a Hallmark movie if it has since been learned the whole thing was a scam perpetrated by a Kekua family friend named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Sadly, Te'o is not the first person to be scammed into thinking they are having an online relationship with someone who doesn't even exist, he is just one of the most prominent people.
The term for this type of scam is referred to as, “being catfished “ and is quite prominent on sites like Facebook and Twitter. While people who are, “catfished” say they had no idea what was going on there are still some questions about how someone could fall for this type of scam for such a long time.
While the Bible does not mention, “being catfished,” specifically, it does however warn Christians not to be naive and blindly give into the enticements of the world around them.
Proverbs 13:20 tells Christians and non Christians that, "He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm."
Proverbs 1:32 puts it even plainer,"For the waywardness of the naive shall kill them, And the complacency of fools shall destroy them."
Proverbs 28:26 also reminds Christians that, "He who trusts in his own heart is a fool, But he who walks wisely will be delivered."
Proverbs 14:16 puts it more bluntly when it says, "A wise man is cautious and turns away from evil, But a fool is arrogant and careless."
A little wisdom or some wise advice from others in the beginning may have helped Manti Te'o avoid the media firestorm which now swirls around him. In the same way the more a Christian walks and talks with those who are wise the more they will grow in wisdom themselves. Likewise the more a Christian tries to walk their own path, the more the Christian will get lost in the wilderness.
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