Day 67: Living Daily in Reality: Why do we want to be a Celebrity?
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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.