1 copy of WHEELMAN will be given away on Goodreads this Friday, Feb. 19th!
Step 1: Go to goodreads.com
Step 2: Create account or log-in with Facebook/social media
Step 3: Search ‘Wheelman’
Step 4: Scroll down and select ‘Enter Giveaway’
Drawing will be in 4 days!
I hope you win.
-Brian
Comedian/speaker Mark Lowry once said, “We don’t help people by showing them our trophies. We help them by showing them our scars.”
This can be an aid to those of us on social media. Let those words marinate with you today. Think about the page posts, tweets, and messages we send out. Our best profile pictures to our lowest moments behind closed doors.
If we put trophies aside and share our ugliest selves, it can help someone else who is hurting.
Skeletons in the closet can (and should) come out.
Today – I heard a message at church about being someone else’s keeper…being beholden to someone else. In the case of the Old Testament, it’s depicting the story of Cain and Abel and Cain not owning up to telling where his brother, Abel, was, when asked. (He actually killed his brother out of jealousy and envy.)
This is an extreme case, but still one worth noting where selfishness and self-centeredness can lead a person. It’s fairly safe to say, we have a love affair with egocentrism in our country.
Let me clarify. Many of us have a real ongoing struggle with love of popularity. I know I do. It’s something I battle everyday. Facebook updates, over-booking my daily schedule with hobby-based activities, profile views on LinkedIn, etc. It’s all a status check daily, and it reminds me of the child-like attention craved in grade school.
Like I said, I wrestle with social media and it’s false sense of security. If you don’t wrestle with this, then, I am thankful that you are free of it (or, can balance it with real-world interactions).
At church today, we saw a video of a guy driving a sports car recklessly around a corner with a sharp bluff below, and an on-board camera showing him going over the bluff and crashing. The camera gave us a vantage point that we really (as an audience) didn’t want.
It was a reminder (to me) that life is more than just profile updates and social media feeds. Also, it showed me that people looking out for one another is an essential part of living on this planet. No person is an island unto themselves (thank you, Mr. John Donne). We need others in our lives that can invest and mentor us and vice versa.
Someone should not only be our brother’s keeper but we should be someone else’s too. It’s the way life was meant to be lived. In a community. With real human beings. When a friend drives off a bluff, we shouldn’t stop to watch from a safe distance, but instead, we should run to help them. Letting Cain’s issue with loving his brother Abel be a lesson to us, we should love those in our lives that genuinely are there for us, and continue to be beholden to those that want us around as mentors.
Happy March 1! -Brian
