Blog 3787 – 04.04.2026
The Great Pretender
Lawyers, politicians, priests, preachers, teachers and most all of us, at one time of another, have been guilty of acting like we think people want us to or saying what we think other people want to hear.
The trouble with lying is the longer and louder we do it the more likely we are of not only convincing others to believe those lies, but starting to believe them ourselves. People who believe the lies they are tell or sell are after all far more convincing.
I recall a Bible college Personal Evangelism professor saying that he believed that Christians were called to be salesman and that our job was to sell the gospel. I remember being taking aback a bit by his theory for I thought Jesus had called his disciples to be fishers of men not salesmen.
Salesmen and fishermen have very different approaches. A true salesman says whatever is necessary to seal the deal, make the sale, and earn his commission. A true fisherman on the other hand casts his net or baits his hook hoping a fish swim in or take a bite. This I think this a more honest transaction.
I studied to be a preacher once. I even had myself convinced for a while that I was “called” to the Christian ministry. If I am honest I must admit my Christian experience was very disappointing. I had thought of Christianity as the old time religion that makes one love everybody. I seldom ever saw that actually practiced to any measurable degree. Someone has said of Christians that they are the only army that kills its own wounded. This nasty habit serves to promote hypocrisy as a self defense mechanism.
The term actors use is “fake it till you make it.” And perhaps if you fake it long enough you will believe it to be true whether it is or not. I am reminded a certain con man who claims to be a winner and successful businessman man, yet has a history of bankruptcies, failed marriages and business ventures. Remarkably he even lost money owning casinos where the house always wins, but not in his case.
Perhaps it was my third failed marriage that caused me to question my misguided faith more than anything else. My beliefs just were not serving me and I grew weary of pretending all the time. Jesus purportedly said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Whether he did or not those words still ring true.
My truth is that I have discarded the beliefs that no longer serve me and am determined to live and to speak my own truth. Believe me that is not as easy as it sounds for a life-long people-pleaser and great pretender. Shakespeare supposedly said, “To thine own self be true and thou canst be false to no man.”
I deeply apologize to all my religious friends for having disappointing them, yet what I regret more than that is every contribution I ever made to a system that keeps captive countless people believing lies that no longer serve them, if they every really did.
Changing or discarding ideas is easier than changing or discarding beliefs. To discard one’s long held beliefs seems at first to many like back-sliding, heresy, or apostasy (religious terms.) In the real world it is called moving forward, progress, or growth.
This is my truth. I feel no desperate need to defend it, yet do not expect me to climb back into the tiny box that religion was for me. If your beliefs serve you by all means hold on to them. Just remember things you have to hold on to so tightly, own you and not the other way around.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
The Platters – The Great Pretender (1956)
theencouragingword 