Lessons Learned (Part 3)
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2021-2022, Lessons Learned
A few years ago, I heard some sound wisdom while helping a friend at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. This is a place were you will find no pretensions. Everyone is genuine and sincere. All understand that they fall short of the glory of God.
At this gathering, people shared their sad stories without fear of being judged by others because everyone is well acquainted with their own faults. As I listened to these accounts, an old man not only shared his story of profound loss and destruction, but offered his advice for recovery from alcoholism. I will never forget his wisdom and even though I cannot point to a specific Chapter and verse of the Bible in direct support of his statement, I can testify from a lifetime of experience that his insight was genuine and most certainly true. He simply said he finally came to a place where he could seriously deal with his problem the day he stopped believing his own bullshit!
Recently, as I lay in the hospital bed, this man’s insights repeatedly occupied my thoughts as I tried to understand what had become of the world in general and mine in particular. The old fellow was right. If we give his statement some serious thought, the biggest problem with each one of us is that through unquestioningly accepting everything we have been told by the “authorities” and “experts” in the media, government, school, church, etc., we have come to believe our own lies.
If we are disconnected from God, we have no way of measuring the veracity of what is being advanced. If we are only provided with one side of a story without ever being encouraged to seek other possibilities, we naturally come to believe the version we think to be the truth.
Let’s look at an example to make this a bit more clear. If a boy has been consistently told that a pencil is an arrow, every pencil will be an arrow to that boy. Even if someone should point out that calling a pencil an arrow is silly or in error, the boy will most likely defend his understanding of pencils being arrows and any reference he may make regarding these “arrows” will be sincere, even if wrong.
The world is full of such trickery, but not all of it is intended to be deceiving. Sometimes, we simply believe what we believe because it is the only thing we have ever heard. Since we have a tendency to believe what the “authorities” and “experts” tell us, we are pretty well full of lies we have come to believe as truth. Then when opportunity arises, we do everything possible to defend our untested belief that we are in possession of the truth.
This is true of everything, including religious beliefs. Please understand that I am in no way dismissing your faith. However, it must be made clear that the vast majority of professing Christians never test what they are being fed against the Bible to make sure it is indeed true. This is usually not a problem when it comes to fundamentals, such as acknowledging Jesus’s death and resurrection as a means to salvation. However, much of what is being taught within religious systems is simply unquestioned and later repeated as truth simply because we trust the individual or agency delivering the message.
Funny how the AA man’s wisdom was so prominent as I reviewed all that is going on in the world and wondered why it is happening. Could it be that we are being bathed in lies that gain power when we internalize them and come to believe them as true? Could it be that we are all believing our own BS and not taking the time to question what we are told and what to believe?
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