AS SEEN ON TV

Wouldn’t it be interesting if for one twenty-four-hour day for one full week our personal life was secretly videoed and that at the end of the week the video was given to us for our eyes only? We could plug it into our VCR and watch. What would we see on the TV? What would what we see tell us about our life? Would we be proud or humbled? Would we be embarrassed and ashamed? What?

I began to wonder in this way as I was unpacking my books after our move, putting them in my bookcases and coming across Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. It’s a little volume he wrote almost twenty years ago but still resonates with me after all these years. Our life does speak whether we are aware of that truth or not. Think of the secret video. Whatever is on that tape speaks about who we are, about our values, about our faith, about our being.

Our life speaks about us and there is nothing we can do to prevent it. One of Parker’s points, in fact, the main one, is for us to be so in control of our life – what we say and what we do, and how we say and do – so that we are truly saying by our words and actions what we as faithful Christians want our life to say about us to anyone who crosses our path.

That is no easy task. In fact, it is a life-long journey in trying to become what we know we should be because we never, ever really get there. One of the reasons we do not is that, if you are like me, most of my days are humdrum and for the most part on most of those days I hardly reflect on how my life speaks to others or even the fact that it actually does. I go from day to day just going on and on.

That says a lot about me and, if you are like me, about ourselves in particular and our world in general. As Christians we are to be role models to others about what Jesus taught and what we say we believe. We know that but, again, are barely conscious of that reality on a day-to-day, let alone a moment-to-moment basis. We blithely give our life permission to say things about what it means to be a Christian when what we are saying is not that Christian.

Our responsibility is to be in charge of what our life is saying to others, even to ourselves. Perhaps the reason why we are so unaware of the fact that we are actually saying something by the way we live is that we hardly ever take the time to reflect on just what that life is saying in the first place. That would be one good reason to have our life videoed. Then we could actually see what our life is saying.

That isn’t going to happen, of course. That might be good. Sadly, if you are like me, we would be too embarrassed by what we see: a person who is unaware of the responsibility to let our life speak as Jesus would have us speak, as we would have it speak.