BEARING WITNESS

Isn't it amazing what people remember from some encounter? Those little details you never think about.

But they sure do remember them. And will mention them to others. Not necessarily in a good way either.

There is a lot of emphasis in Christian circles about being a good witness. How often it seem to relate to living a pious life.

One where you are always loving and never have a bad thought. You just are the perfection of righteousness.

Never met a person that was truly all that righteous, but such standards. Well not if you included the times they actually acted normal.

And that is other than perfect. It will include some kind of sin. A mar on their lives that you can't ignore.

Why is it that truth is so often only important to God? That we need to somehow share our testimony without all the facts.

As if others won't really notice. Somehow they will just see what we tell them and never notice what is in our souls.

Course that is reality. Not one that gets mention is churches. We get all the dialogue of spirituality, but it is all void of some details.

So the image seen is the one that conforms to our impression. The truth becomes the story we tell ourselves.

And in the end, the witness gets made impotent because others see the reality we don't want to admit to. At least not to them.

The more this is practiced the farther we drift for the land of honesty. We keep repeating the same illusion long enough and we will believe it ourselves.

I think that is the part, which is truly sad. To not be able to bear it all in terms of how Jesus truly redeemed our lives.

Or perhaps the big problem is that maybe, just maybe we weren't that redeemed. We didn't really change that much.

It doesn't mean that is always bad. But it might also mean or imply that perhaps we weren't really listening to the Lord either.

Only time and the truth will remove any veils of our excuses.