To Be Known

I want to be known. Sometimes I think about how people will remember me or how friends would describe me. I am very consumed with what people think of me.

Sometimes I think that it would be cool to be famous. Cameras would follow me and people would comment on things that I wear and who is seen with me at important events, concerts or movie premieres. I would act as though I did not even notice the cameras and the flashes. I would smile and have quiet conversations about trivial things while others looked on wanting to be me.

I think that I am funny in a charming and intelligently witty way. I wonder if others would describe me as funny or just stupid.
I once saw a guy who would swallow billiard balls and barf them back up. David Letterman called him “the great regurgitator.” That would be a cool thing to be known for in a disgusting kind of way.

I want to be known for my great ideas. I need to be recognized as someone who has contributed something significant. I want people to notice and affirm me. Paul wants us to be known as being forbearing. That sounds like a lame thing to be known for. I would rather have people say, “he’s so cute,” or “he is so creative,” or “he is such a deep thinker.” It just doesn’t sound as cool to have someone say, “he is so forbearing.”

“How would I describe goz?” “Well, I think that he is forbearing…in a cute, creative, deep sort of way.” LAME.
What does Paul mean forbearing? It is a word that is pretty hard to communicate with just one other word in translation. Some have used the word meek or “gentle.” But even these spiritual sounding words leave something out of what Paul meant. One writer defines forbearing this way, “considerate courtesy and respect for the integrity of others which prompts a person not to be forever standing on his rights.”

The Beautiful Things

Paul writes that there are things that are noble and worth of praise and these are things that ought to occupy our minds. He makes a list which can be summed up as thinking beautifully. There is beauty in people. Beauty is one of those things that I do not completely understand. To the extent that people are made in the likeness of God they are beautiful. Some are a little more polished that others but all have beauty.

We automatically go to the surface of things. We look at the paint job and are fooled by what is under the hood. Paul is challenging us to see as God sees to look beneath the skin and the appearance of things and find the good, true and beautiful things in the people that we live with.

If I were to ask you to make a list of things that annoy you about someone close to you the pen would fly across the page. What about if I asked you to write down the gifts and abilities and beautiful ways in which that person displays the character of God. Pause… These are things that ought to jump out to us, the things that must become obvious to us if we are to live in harmony and unity among imperfect but redeemed people.

I don’t think that Paul is advocating a blind ignorance in assessing people but a hopeful optimism believing the best, putting arrogance aside and confessing our self-righteous judgments. We do not know the motives of men, therefore we must make mistakes evaluating with the grace of God.

Larry King and Jesus

I was watching Larry King the other night after church. I heard the president of the American Atheists say that there was never a person such as Jesus Christ. It seemed to me like a bold, uninformed statement. I thought to myself, “how can she say this?” Even if you don’t believe the Bible is true and that much of it’s contents are the revision of the church, how can someone just say that Jesus never lived?

I supposed that she would soon denounce the existence of others that we have so ignorantly taken for granted. What about that whole moon landing was it just a video? I thought about writing her and asking for her confirmation regarding my place in history. There is nothing threatening about me or Napoleon. It is of little consequence that either of has lived, but someone with the apparent influence of Jesus Christ, well that is another matter.

I wonder if it is at all possible to convince someone of the existence of God who begins with the shadow in their heart of not wanting to believe. I am more and more convinced that people are not argued into the kingdom of heaven, it is not about evidence and reason it is about choice and will. Jesus once talked about men preferring to live in darkness rather than having their inconsistencies and shortcomings revealed by the light. (my paraphrase of John 3:19-20).

I suppose that even a historical Jesus in an ironic way cannot make it into historical existence in the mind of an atheist.