fear of man

So I'm currently sitting in my favorite coffee shop in Chesapeake, Bean There, watching it storm outside and reading. I'm also listening to Pandora, which I've recently rediscovered as being awesome.

Anyways, something I've been thinking about lately as it's come up in sermons at church and in small group discussion has been what my new pastor, Eric, referred to as 'fear of man.' The fear of man being when I let the fear of what others think of me dictate how I act.

This is something I've struggled with most of my life; worrying about how others view me. Never wanting people to dislike me, or think badly of me... I always have to be funny, or smart, or hardworking, or responsible, or any of a million other good things. While I don't think it's inherently bad to be any of these things, I've compromised my integrity on more than one occasion in order to maintain that image. I've laughed at things when I cringe inside, I've argued over a point just to prove myself right, I've used work as an excuse when really just didn't want to do something else.

Why do I put forth this false self? Why do I need people to like me? To think I'm better than I really am? And what's worse, my actions are telling lies about the gospel. In church we talked about Galatians 2 where Paul confronts Peter from withdrawing from the Gentile believers when the Jewish believers arrived. By worrying about what the Jewish believers would think of him, Peter's actions were saying that the Gentile believers were inferior, that they weren't as good as the Jewish believers.

What lies are told by the way I'm living my life?

I hope that being aware of it will help me to be less prone to worrying about what others think about me. I'm not sure that there's some magic steps that I can follow in order to break myself of it, but it's something I'll continue to deal with.

Too Much Tragedy

I am so tired of my school coming up in the news for the wrong reasons.

My heart goes out for the families of all those affected in the shootings on the military base of Fort Hood in Texas. Every time I hear about something like that my mind immediately goes back to the shootings at Virginia Tech over two years ago. And the fact that the shooter at Ft. Hood was a graduate of VT made feel even worse about it. There have been a seemingly absurd number of deaths that have had ties to Virginia Tech over the past couple of years. To name a few...

• This is how the 2006-2007 school year started, with an escaped convict killing two people and escaping into Blacksburg.

• Then of course the shootings on April 16th 2007 where a gunman killed 32 students and professors before turning the gun on himself.

• The following November, a freshman committed suicide by jumping out of a window in Pritchard hall (the dorm I lived in.)

• In February of 2008, a student was killed and another badly injured when they were hit by a car while crossing the street

• This past January, a graduate student was killed and decapitated by another graduate student in a cafe on campus.

• In August, two Virginia Tech students were found shot dead at a local campground

• In October, a Virginia Tech student went missing after a Metallica concert in Charlottesville and has still not been found.

• and now a Virginia Tech graduate, Nidal Malik Hasan is suspected to be responsible for the death of 13 soldiers and civilians at Ft. Hood in Texas.

Does this list seem ridiculous to anyone else for a span of 2 1/2 years? It's probably not even everything that happened, there's probably some incident that I've forgotten about. It sometimes seem like a cloud hangs over the school, that death and tragedy are not far from the students of the school.

And more than once, I have felt weighed down by all of this death and tragedy at the place that was home to me for 5 years, the lives lost were people I walked by every day, had class with, watched football games with. You would think we'd be good at dealing with tragedy by now, but that's something that I don't think we can ever get 'good' at.

I pray God would comfort those affected by this latest tragedy, and those that continue to be affected by all the other tragedies. I don't know what else to say beyond that.