Have you played this? We’ve played it for years. It’s become very popular among social media and news outlets.

And it’s tiresome.

The game goes by many names, such as “the truth,” “the rest of the truth,” and “my side of the story.” Objective facts can only be played if there’s a way to adjust them for the sake of the outcome. They also supply some backup for the claim “this is true.”

What’s funny is that opponents both play skillfully, leaving audiences unsure where to look for accurate information upon which to build their own decisions.

And it’s exhausting.

Three V. You might wonder by now what those are. They’re Villain, Victim, and Village Idiot. We’ll practice with a fairy tale, Three Little Pigs.

The villain is quite clear. It’s the wolf. That is, unless you let him tell his side of the story. According to him, he was simply trying to feed his family a pork roast. More innocently, he was illustrating the risks of building houses from straw or sticks. Why should he get a bad reputation for that?

The victim is the pig who built with bricks. The wolf shows up on his lawn right behind two litter mates who just had their houses blown in. Now home is chaotic & crowded. Poor pig.

This points out the village idiots – two pigs who chose straw and sticks for their building materials. That’s asking for trouble such as they got. Silly little pigs.

See how it’s played? Take any story, and you can quickly assign roles – Villain, Victim, and Village idiot. Even health issues & natural disasters get this treatment, especially if the talking heads can boost their ratings by playing the game.

Seriously, listen to the conversations and commentaries around you, the overall vibe that subtly saturates your mind. Are you, as the Apostle Paul advises in Philippians 4:8, thinking on what is true, lovely, worthy of your time & emotional/spiritual energy? Or are you caught up in this crazy game where nobody wins and the only way to be uplifted is to have the last word?

Give yourself and the other humans in your realm a break. Stop playing.