Fly

Blue herons are my favorite birds. I hear them and I smile. Far from a beautiful voice or musical sound like a canary, they squawk and make an awful sound. However, I know they are there. It is who they are and I appreciate that!

Abraham Lincoln is credited with the old saying I have heard all my life:

” You can fool all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.” This is a fundamental truth.

Many people go through life trying to fool others. We try to sing a different song or live a different life than we feel true in our hearts. We create false impressions or even project fake identities. Sometimes we create images inconsistent with facts. We might get so successful at small white lies or bluffing people with exaggerated accounts of events that we start to believe them and remember them this way. Others have forged resumes and gotten jobs through made up credentials.

As the old folks say, “your chickens will come home to roost”.  As Judge Judy says, ” it’s easier to tell the truth, then you don’t have to have a good memory”. Who has seen people change their story with each time they tell it. As Judy says, it’s so much easier if you tell the truth because you can tell the same story over and over without having to try to remember different versions.

If you try to pretend to be a different person with different people, you are too busy trying to keep up the act to enjoy yourself. We cannot fool anyone but ourselves. As a friend told me when he was fudging on the truth,  Mama Johnson would say, “Just keep talking until you convince yourself”.

You’ve heard people say, “I can see right through him.” We all know “BS” when we see it or hear it.  We may be able to fool others for a season, but God searches hearts and examines “secret motives”. He knows the secrets of our hearts. Jeremiah 17:10

Merge your public self with your private self. Be yourself, even if you have the singing voice of a heron, or gangly legs, or wade in water too deep sometimes. Somebody will appreciate you, just the way you are!