Hanging around with friends after a church service recently, and I was having a good ol’ rant about current societal evils. Boy oh boy, it felt good to vent.

 

But there was a hollow ring to that satisfaction. And it didn’t take much reflection to figure out why. I felt like one of those sqibs, a piddly little firework that goes, hiss, then a pathetic pop. Followed by… an anticlimactic nothing. Nada. Niets.

 

In my younger days, we joined Amnesty International and wrote letters to the offending government. These days we fume our outrage via social media.

 

But then what? Hiss. Pop. Nothing.

 

Maybe before I do right, I need to be right. I mean, do I actually CARE?

 

Because, if I truly cared, wouldn’t I DO something?

 

Jesus was saying to the crowd who came to listen, who came for answers:

“You don’t get wormy apples off a healthy tree, nor good apples off a diseased tree. The health of the apple tells the health of the tree. You must begin with your own life-giving lives. It’s who you are, not what you say and do, that counts. Your true being brims over into true words and deeds.”

Luke 6:43-45 

 

Then it’s not what I write either – in this blog, on my Facebook wall – that makes me who I am?

 

It’s so easy to have a platform where we express ourselves, but I suspect we have totally swallowed the ‘alternative truth’: what I say I am, I am.

In the meantime, what has happened to the true me? Gone out to lunch while the PR and Marketing guys are working overtime? So impressed by the sales pitch, that I’ve inadvertently taken it on as my ‘true identity’?

I need to get this sorted, if only because I don’t want to be spouting emptiness, hypocrisy.

 

Again: Do I really care?

 

Dear God, give me Your heart.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Apple blossom in Mum’s garden, May 2017