In what our pastor likes to call “the Basic Instruction Book Before Leaving Earth” (BIBLE) we are warned to beware of wolves in sheeps’ clothing. The need for that age-old advice seems never truer than in today’s world.

I recently covered the Hawkins City Council meeting in which there was a presentation arguing affronts involving the Jesus sign (yes, still). This involves a group who say that they meet on the property to hold their worship sessions. They say the city is discriminating against them trying to enforce an easement concerning the sign. The city says the church could easily move the sign a few feet and it wouldn’t be on the city’s easement.

After the meeting adjourned, I saw a couple of women having a discussion and, though I did not witness the entire conversation, I did see one telling the other that she thought she needed to read some other Bible scriptures as she walked off with a set look on her face. I’m going to come out of the closet here. The first time I silently read that “Jesus welcomes you to Hawkins” it was punctuated with a question mark in my mind. Really? To me, that sounds like a chamber of commerce slogan and I admit I’m not crazy about Jesus’ name being bandied about in something such as that. And our Lord is omnipresent. So why would he be welcoming us to just one East Texas town? I would rather be welcomed to heaven.

Many times as this Hawkins situation has transpired I’ve gone back to another slogan and acronym I still see worn on bracelets sometimes. What would Jesus do? I just don’t feel like he would be causing such a fuss over something such as this.

But I digress. The subject of this is wolves in sheeps’ clothing and the timeliest example of this in our everyday world is the “phishing” of the Tyler School District. We are instructed by law enforcement experts almost continuously to guard our identifying information. Do not give out your birth date, social security and account numbers and such to anyone who calls your home. Shred documents that have that kind of information before throwing them away. I try to imagine how vulnerable, exposed those hundreds of employees of the Tyler School District must feel after their W2s were provided in a scam last week. We aren’t that far away, and many of our local folks work there or have ties to that district. Plus, TISD was only one of many other school districts and firms that fell for the scam.

However, one business in private industry also received that same scam attempt the same day as Tyler ISD. Their alert human resources folks, though, noticed that something just wasn’t right about their CEO’s email address which appeared be to the origin of the email. They questioned it enough to send it to their security technology folks who identified it as a phishing attempt. I know these folks are aware of their narrow miss, and are probably heaving a huge collective sigh of relief. Give those folks a raise. They did their job, with vigilance.

A short time after I saw the alert about the TISD scam, I had my own close call with the Zeus virus. Clicked on a link about a Christian-run refuge for women who had left the adult entertainment industry and my entire screen went electric blue with this almost typewriter looking font that said I had a virus. It instructed me not to do anything else or my computer could be infected and all would be lost and passwords might even be infiltrated. It gave a telephone number to call for technology support which was, of course, not our technology department.

Fortunately, I had saved and closed out my stories. And even more fortunately, one of my top technology go-to people, our company co-owner Jessica Woodall picked up her phone when I called her as I fought visions of losing my entire week’s work because of the message. Unplug the computer she instructed me without missing a beat. Don’t even x out, I asked her. No, she said. I did as she said. She said wait about 10 seconds and plug back in and if it doesn’t come back up, we’ll deal with it. This is the virus in which they hold all your information for ransom and demand thousands of dollars to get it back. I plugged it back in and prayed as the programs ever so slowly went through their initializing process. All was there and I heaved a huge sigh of relief and thanks.

In yet another scam attempt, a friend told me week before last that someone had called her telling her that there was a problem with her social security and asked for her information. She, a former newspaper employee, knew better and hung up. Still, it planted enough doubt to worry her and she was making an appointment to talk to the Social Security Administration.

And then we have our local example of a grandparent who was almost victimized in a telephone scam but wasn’t, thanks to some well-trained folks at Walmart. Most times folks are embarrassed when this happens to them and don’t want people to know who it was. But I give credit to our very own local testimonial whose letter appears on page 2A. We have written many articles warning folks about these scams. Our sheriffs, police chief and others have warned our readers about this sort of thing. But my hope is that this firsthand account from someone our readers know will take hold and register in their memories.

I remember reading the Dickens’ novel about the children who were taught at a very young age in the art of being a pickpocket. It seems we’re surrounded by a modern-day, technological version of this. If only these people would focus their skills and time on doing something productive instead of destructive. As soon as I began carrying a purse, I was taught to hold it close to my body, not to set it down and never turn my back on it in a public place. This, and many other life lessons on being safe, has become second nature. We need to do the same as we stay aware of the countless scammers out there and train ourselves to vigilantly heed the warnings about how to avoid falling victim to today’s crooks.