. . . And The Award Goes To . . .

I'm at home and flipping through the channels and stumbled across the Academy Awards on T.V.  Slumdog Millionaire just won for the best picture while Kate Winslet, Sean Penn, and the late Heath Ledger all won awards for their acting talent.  It got me thinking . . . and that is usually when I get in trouble!

I have always thought I would be a GREAT ACTOR . . . it is probably a fantasy that many of us have from time to time.  Wouldn't it be fantastic to make a living pretending you were someone else?  Maybe we all think that we could do that because we spend a lot of time acting!  We act like we aren't afraid, we act like we know what we are doing, we act like we have it all together . . . but we hope that we are the only ones who know that WE ARE ACTING!

12-step groups have a saying, "fake it 'till you make it!"  Many of us live our lives feeling like we are doing that . . . faking it, hoping that no one will discover the REAL YOU!  Unfortunately, this does not help very much!  Honesty and integrity call us to live our lives truthfully before God, others, and ourselves.  Proverbs 11:3 says, "The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity."

I will never hear someone say to me, " . . . and the academy award goes to . . ."  But then again, that's probably the way it should be!