A comedian gets me to laugh or a teacher causes me to learn, but I’ve never understood what I’m supposed to get from a presenter that oozes sweetness. What I find remarkable is that the only place I’ve encountered such affliction is within the church setting. Whether it is a television evangelist or a retreat speaker, it’s as though they think dramatizing their words will produce an emotional response. For many of us the results are just the opposite. When a speaker forces a sigh or a sob that fail to come from the heart, it is merely sugar coated hypocrisy.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----I like sugar coating. The jelly inside the bean is a bit sweet, but it is more annoyingly sticky between the teeth. I don’t eat jellybeans for that, I eat them for their yummy sugar shells. And I learned a place for dramatizing for emotional response, not so much for this response in others, but for it in myself. I was quite bipolar in my early twenties. It became so serious I had to deal with it before it destroyed my life. I discovered my bipolar nature was coming from excessive dwelling upon either what I was not or upon what I should be. At times I became so mentally caught up in what I was not that my emotions fed my mind more reasons to believe I was completely deficient. Other times I became so caught up in what I should be that the same process made me believe I was mostly what I should be. But what I should be was not what I actually was. Reality would soon kick in and send me back to acknowledging what I simply was not. The escape I found from those horrible storms was through understanding what I could be.
-----Now that required something like a sugar coating, because neither was I what I could be. That I could be something released me from lusting after what I should be, making it possible to become what I could be. But to escape the fall back into what I was not, I actually had to become what I could be. So how could I become it? Practice. Practice is like a sugar coating because it is being what you are not to invest experience and emotions into what you can be until you completely are it. Then you will become less what you are not since you have now actually become more of what you can be. But if practice ends at that point, then that is all you will be until eventually you will once again begin recognizing how much you are not and how much you should be. That is why practice must continue. One either moves forward or falls backward. There is no remaining the same.
-----Therefore, practice, like a sugar coating, is what I like in myself. And I also like to see it in others. But as you are bothered by excessive sugar coatings, so am I. For I know from where they come - the delusion that you can seem what you should be, or the self-delusion that you are it. And these delusions impair one from becoming what he can be, causing one to remain what he is not.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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