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Dalton
Roberts |
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These words of Oscar Wilde stopped me in my tracks: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry.” Did you let someone else cheat you out of being you? Are you really them? Are their thoughts your thoughts? Whatever happened to your thoughts? Did you ever have your own original thoughts about God? Did you go off somewhere in the desert and bury your God and adopt theirs? Do you honestly like your God better but don’t want to upset them by telling them so? Are you going to leave your God buried out there in the desert forever? How far have you gone with this business of being other people? How much of your self do you have left? Why not just go ahead and change your name to theirs since you are living their life. This may sound severe but living someone else’s life is one of the most severe griefs. No matter what you do, you cannot commit a more severe sin. To make it worse, it is a sin against yourself as well as your Creator. If God had wanted two of us, God could have made two of us when the original “us” was created. But God does not have a cookie cutter. God only makes ones-of-a-kind. If you want to imagine how God must feel when we become other people, think of yourself as the father or mother of ten children. After the first one is born, each subsequent child follows that first child around, repeating every word he said, doing everything he did, combing his or her hair the same way, eating what he or she ate. It would tempt you to pinch off the first child’s head before he could reproduce. Yet that is exactly what we have done. We let Mama and Daddy sit their God on a throne in our mind. We married some person that someone told us to marry. Or maybe someone got us excited about a guru and we turned our belief system over to them because they were so “spiritual.” Jesus said some of the most holy looking spiritual people you would ever see were “full of dead men’s bones.” The BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) serial killer was president of his Lutheran congregation. How would you like for him to set his god up inside your mind?” As silly as that question may sound, it is entirely possible you could have turned your mind over to such a warped person.These people don’t have horns and split tails. They can look like angels or the sweetest looking old grandmothers. Once a half-famous guru asked to write a book about his life. He had a full white robe and his long silver hair fell down to his waist. To look at him you would think of Gandhi or Gabriel. He was not a Gandhi or a Gabriel. He was a big fat windbag with an elephantine ego -- a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I decided I didn’t want to tell his story and be responsible for one person letting him take control of their mind. These are dramatic examples of the kind of people we give our minds to. Yet our minds are the most priceless gift from the Creator. Through control of yourown mind you can make your life a paradise. Even St. Paul told us to use our own minds: ”Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” In the original Greek “fear and trembling” mean reverence and wonder.” George Fox preached all over England the same message which led to the formation of the Quaker religion. In essence he said, “You can tell me what Moses, Paul, John and Peter say about God and religion, but what canst thou say?” He dared to tell us that our opinion mattered. Each of us should ask often, ”What can I say?’
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