Jitterbugging for Jesus

FIND YOUR BALANCE

“Wrinkled women lifting their faces, chasing their youth.
Fat men sucking in bellies.
Poor folks putting on airs.
Sinners acting like saints.
All of us keeping pace with our companions, stepping lively in this dance of deceit.

From “Home to Harmony: A Harmony Novel), by Philip Gulley*

Maybe conceit is just another word for deceit, and we’re all conceited people, some of us more than others.

Yours truly the Jitterbugger wayyyy more than others, so you can charge me guilty of conceit and deceit under what my prosecutor friends refer to as “the plenty guilty rule of law.” I’m OK with my wrinkles (most men are) but do suck in my belly a lot (I’ve been known to actually do that; intentionally stand up straighter and suck it up!).

The conceit of the times we live in–which my own “Baby Boom” generation started–is that if we eat reasonably well, exercise hard and intensely enough, challenge our minds and bodies enough with bold new tests of our wills, we’ll be golden. We’ll live a long, long healthy life and die in our sleep with a smile on our face.

Granted–we’ll have to believe in God and try to be good people, but if we just live by the golden rule we’ll be golden. Believing in whatever our vague notion of God might be and trying to be good people is the best insurance of all to spare us any discomfort in life, not to mention any pain, suffering or death.

Take a scripture here and take a scripture from there and yeah–you can cobble together that so-called “prosperity theology” and then you can make the woefully wrongheaded case that, if we just try to be good people God not only will deliver us from any pain or discomfort–God will actually reward us and enrich us with plenty cash left over for “Black Friday,” that day in which Americans, in all their conceit, run over each other in the effort to get great deals on great stuff like treadmills and wrinkle removers that will feed their conceits and deceits.

There are plenty of preachers and churches out there that are perfectly willing to exploit this conceit and deceit theology to the fullest. They build megachurches on our conceits and deceits. But then, they are only one pack among the wolves in sheep’s clothing out there. Politicians, the giant corporations (they who actually elect our politicians), advertisers–all the many and varied wolves out there don’t even have to attack us. We’re plenty williing in all our conceits and deceits to keep them fed down to our bones (or our last dollar), and they know it.

I’m thinking in my reflection times with God today about what my conceits and deceits are, and how I might get myself detached from those and get closer my God to thee. Sucking in my ever-inflatable belly has always been a strain and a drain on my energies and just ain’t working for me anyway.

*(Click here for another website of Philip Gulley, the fine and might fine writer and Quaker minister.)