What Your Blog Audience Knows About You That They Won’t Say.
Do other people have the same voracious hunger for information that I have? I don’t have time to read everything that interests me, but whenever I’m reseaching one thing, and am distracted by another in the process, I bookmark it, or email it to myself, or subscribe to the RSS feed. And I have a broad range of information that interests me – some of which relates to writing, and small business marketing and social media.
Occasionally I get to review a few of the enormous number of feeds to which I subscribe (!), and today this one sounded interesting. And it brought back unexpected memories…
The author does an effective job of explaining how people resist claims of perfection, as they intuitively know they are chicanery, whether the claims relate to a product, or breadth of knowledge, or personal integrity.
I grew up in an environment that encouraged such subterfuge. Not consciously. I don’t believe people were intentionally teaching me to be duplicitous. I don’t think they realized that’s what they were doing. We were told to separate ourselves from the evils in the world, and that would assist us in the development of personal righteousness.
Now I believe this to be true. I believe that if we refrain from stealing or frequenting strip clubs or abusing drugs or physically assaulting our neighbors or children when we’re angry, that these abstentions will assist us in developing righteousness. But over time, we tend to forget these restraints are only helps. And as we discover how difficult it is to maintain personal integrity, some of us start to expand the list of activities and people and places we avoid – thinking such choices will preserve and protect our moral perfection.
Only when we get this far, we’ve really lost sight of the goal. The goal isn’t to cocoon ourselves, to coat ourselves in impenetrable titanium and hold our breath until we are rescued from this harsh reality called life, unblemished. The goal is to invade the darkness with light. To take the offensive. To step bravely toward evil as it accosts us and resist it’s lure and expose it’s costs.
And we can’t do that if we are never in the presence of evil. Neither would we be perfect; we would only be untried. Segregating ourselves from evil makes life more manageable. We unconsciously attempt to live it in our own strength, because when you’ve placed all those fences around yourself – it’s doable. Living in the midst of darkness is not manageable. It requires a power and wisdom beyond our own.
I used to be the Queen of Fences. A few still resist dismantling. I remember a time in Bible college when I asked myself, “Is this all there is? Is this all it takes to live a righteous and holy life?” I had no idea that my fences were what made “perfection” easy. That my controlled approach to living life, limiting my exposure to the brokenness of the world and denying the rest, was giving me a false picture of my own goodness.
I wonder if that’s why so many people despise Christians, today. They ran into me thirty years ago, and they knew I wasn’t real…
