Who are you giving yourself away to? To what propaganda have you come to subscribe? To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb? Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached? What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense? What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to? Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum? Who are you giving yourself away to?
Denial of Such Foolishness
We would likely say that we have not given ourselves to anyone. That none of these things are happening, and if perchance they are, we have successfully and rather astutely avoided them. We would say that we are not so gullible nor so pathetically naïve as to fall for such trickery. But are we? Have we? Really?
How often are we deceived into believing that some shining leader has been intimately touched by the cry of our hearts, and has been so moved by those cries as to lay aside everything near and dear to them in order to respond to those cries, despite the cost to them to do so? How many times have we been fooled into believing that some cause has been raised up because the collective voice of the people has been blatantly ignored by all of the other causes that purported to serve those people and heed those voices? How many times have we been beguiled by the rhetoric of power-mongers’ who are quick to prey upon the disadvantaged in the culture in order to build small camps that are then set to war against each other…for the way to control is to divide. Who are you giving yourself away to?
Are These Causes Really Ours?
Are these ideals and causes and beliefs and values ours? Really? Or were they made to appear that way? Have we been bamboozled? Have we fallen for the old snake-oil sales pitch? Have we drunken the Kool-Aid not by the glass, but by the gallon? Have we been sold a bill-of-goods while believing that we have hit the mother-load? Have we been so deceived that we are living out someone else’s convictions that having nothing to do with us? Are we nursing someone’s else’s agenda with our life blood? Are we erecting podiums built for some leader who will soon forget every single person who built it for them before the leader themselves falls away from that very podium? Are we slaves who don’t recognize the fact that we have sold ourselves over to slavery? The question remains…who have we given ourselves away to?
Think About It…
What are you giving yourself away to? Into whose web have you fallen? For you were not created for the convictions, or the agendas, or the podiums driven by someone else’s self-serving purposes or self-glorifying agendas. You were created for greater things. Life-altering things. Things that make history as much as it changes it. You were made for much greater things than the slavery of deceit. So don’t squander your life falling for someone’s slight-of-hand, or slippery spins, or buttery smooth verbiage.
Rather, discover what God placed you here to do and refuse to do nothing less than that. Be who God created you to be and not what someone else wants you to be, for to be ‘you’ is to be the greatest person that you possibly can be. Do not give yourself away to those who are certain to throw you away. Rather, give yourself over to be the person God infused you with the life and the power and the authority and the wisdom and the privilege to be. Be you, for your greatest life lays in doing that.
“Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
- Psalm 139:16
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC