Who's Henry Wickadiddle?

            Last weekend, I went to Wanda’s all-school reunion in Blunt.  Wanda’s parents still live there, so I’ve gotten to know a few people in Blunt, but not many.  I really was not particularly expecting to know anyone at her school reunion.

            As a result, as we signed in I had this sudden temptation to write a false name on my name tag and come up with a fake identity for myself.  “Henry Wickadiddle, class of 1970!  Yeah, we lived outside of town.  Remember where the barn burned down back in ’64?  We lived a ways past there.  Now?  I’m selling appliances.  No store, just door-to-door.  Yeah, it’s tough, but the commissions are fantastic!”  Wouldn’t that have been great?

            I didn’t actually do it, of course.  I didn’t do it partly because I didn’t think I could get away with it, but mostly because Wanda would’ve killed me.  It was kind of tempting, though.

Kids aren’t the only ones who like to play “let’s pretend”, after all.  I think most of us, no matter how well our lives are going, think once in a while about how it might be to be someone else.  We think about how it would be to be some famous person or how it would be to live in some exotic place.  We think about how it would be to be someone else, rather than being who we are.
          

It’s not necessarily wrong to pretend, as long as everyone knows we’re just pretending, but it can be a dangerous game to play.  It’s wrong to try to fool others with our pretending, for obvious reasons.  What’s even worse, though, is when our pretending fools ourselves.

          

That can be easy to do, too.  One of the problems with our human nature is that we have an incredible ability to believe that the things we want to be true actually are.  That can be especially true when we want to do something we know we shouldn’t do, or when we don’t want to do something we know we should do.  We can come up with all sorts of excuses, rationalizations, and deceptions to convince ourselves to behave the way we want to behave, rather than the way we know we should behave.

          

The thing about that, though, is that eventually it all catches up to us.  No one can get away with pretending forever, not even to themselves.  Truth always wins out in the end.  It may take some time, there may be times when it looks like truth is losing, but truth always wins.  We cannot fool anyone, not even ourselves, forever.

          

That’s why scripture says the truth will set us free.  Fooling others, and fooling ourselves, is not easy.  It’s hard work.  It gets complicated.  Focusing on the truth is a lot easier and less complicated.  Not necessarily in the short run—truth can involve things that people, including ourselves, don’t want to hear—but in the long run, it’s the only way to go.

          

Henry Wickadiddle doesn’t exist.  Jeff Adel does.  My focus needs to be on being honest, both with myself and others.