Character is who you are in the dark

Character is who you are in the dark.

 

I love that quote.

 

Character is not so much what you do as much as who you are.

 

"Image" is what people think you are.  Character is what you really are.

 

I always say, "I can teach  - how to do something - I can't teach character."

 

Isn't it amazing that when we sin - we like to sin in private?

 

And we think that God doesn't see us?

 

Dallas Willard writes about a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl in her backward who one day discovered the secret to making mud (which she called "warm chocolate"). 

 

Her grandmother had been reading and was facing away from the action, but after cleaning up what was to her a mess, she told her little Larissa not to make any  more chocolate and turned her chair around so as to be facing her granddaughter.

 

The little girl soon resumed her "warm chocolate" routine, with one request posed as sweetly as a 2-and-a-half-year-old can make it:  don't look at me, Nana.  Okay?"  Nana (being a little co-dependent) of course agreed.

 

Larissa continued to manufacture warm chocolate.  Three times she said, as she continued her work, "Don't look at me, Nana.  Okay?"

 

Dallas Willard then writes, "Thus the tender soul of a little child shows us how necessary it is to us that we be unobserved in our wrong."

 

I would suggest to you that anytime we do wrong or withhold ourselves from doing right, we choose hiddenness at the same time.

 

We think God doesn't observe what we are doing/saying/thinking/feeling.

 

And maybe, just maybe, it may be that out of all the prayers that are ever spoken, the most common one, the quietest one; the one that we are hesitant to share with others that we pray - is simply this:  "Don't look at me God."

 

Today, as you walk about your daily activities, ask yourself - Would God be pleased with what I am saying or doing?  Is my life an "open book" before the Lord?

 

Does my life put a "smile on God's face?"

 

Just a thought for a Thursday.