Day 67: Why do we want to be a Celebrity?
Day 67: Living Daily in Reality: Why do we want to be a Celebrity? ==================================================================
We’re talking about the human personality and the reason we ourselves have such difficulty doing what we think we should do. We’ve said that we were made by our maker as part of his only son so that we could enjoy his love and let his son develop this planet through us. But we have used our free will to ignore our Creator and depend on the things, people, and circumstances of the world to provide the security, significance, and happiness that only our Father-Creator’s love can give us.
Many of us use Facebook and Twitter because we are interested in other people and want to keep in touch with our friends – and make new friends. But many of us carefully list the things we’re doing or the places we’re visiting because we want others to know that we exist and have interesting lives. Sometimes that’s all that our interest in social media means. But sometimes we feel it expresses that we’re important and that our existence matters. Indeed, at times we need the reassurance we get from our blogs because we realize there are about seven billion other people like us in the world – so it’s easy to feel you’re just a tiny blob of humanity that nobody really cares about. That’s why some of us will do anything to be on television where people can see us – and recognize that we exist. It’s very easy in this mass society to feel you’re a little zero that means nothing to anyone. We wish we could be a celebrity and think it would be wonderful to be in that position of admiration and popularity in so many people’s eyes.
Indeed we feel we are different from others – in all kinds of ways that they don’t seem to notice, and this seems more and more likely as our genetic scientists come up with the details of our DNA which suggest that each of us is absolutely unique – there’s no one like you in the whole world – and there never has been. Even though we find this hard to believe yet we do feel we’re different – we do have a sense that no one else has felt just the same feelings as we have.
And, of course, this is all true. Our maker’s son – Jesus of Nazareth – likened his Father to a good shepherd that knows each of his sheep by name and has counted all the hairs of our heads. So it is no wonder that we feel we’re different or important or significant – especially when it’s evident that our Maker regarded each of us as dear as his only Son. This readiness to put us before his only Son by allowing our predecessors to actually kill him heightens our sense of his estimate of our value in his eyes – and there is no other opinion of us that matters. So we are born with a real sense of our own value in the eyes of some significant other, and we never lose that sense of personal value.
It is impossible to find a substitute for the love of our Creator – there is just no other being who can give us that sense of significance
or importance, especially when you know He made you different from everyone else so that he could express through you part of himself that no one else expressed. This results in that strong sense of significance that each one of us has that can never be fully satisfied by the recognition or approval of mere human beings. Although it would find itself perfectly at peace in submitting to the one that made it, it cannot bear to submit willingly to any other power, but always searches for a way to assert itself and gain the attention that it thinks it deserves.
So we find ourselves with a will that insists on asserting itself and its rights at every opportunity. The will is the pivot-point of the whole personality and is free only while it is constrained by a conscience in active relationship with its maker: otherwise it loses its executive power and becomes a slave to the outside world. Its fulfillment is found in directing our personality in accordance with our conscience which reads God’s purposes for each of us.