Be Honest About Your Life

I've been reading about the recent controversy surrounding Eben Alexander's alleged near-death experience. To some extent, it reminds me of the situation with Ergun Caner. But the controversy with Alexander is less settled. It just came up. He's said that he'll respond to his critics in more depth in the future. We'll see what he has to say. By contrast, Caner's lies and other misbehaviors have been widely documented and widely discussed for years. Among other problems, both men seem to have been dissatisfied with the significant experiences they had in life, so they decided to try to make the experiences seem more significant with embellishments.

What's happened to them should serve as a warning to all of us. Be honest about your life, whether the home you came out of, your résumé, your conversion to Christianity, other miracles you think you've experienced, or whatever. From time to time, we ought to review what we're telling other people about ourselves. Are we being honest?

Everything will ultimately be revealed. Why not be honest now? People don't need you to be great. They don't need your experiences to be great. They need the great God you're supposed to be serving. There's a sense in which we should seek to be great, but we don't do it by being dishonest.

Most people aren't publicly exposed the way Alexander and Caner have been, largely because they never had the sort of platform that such men have had. When you have that sort of platform, people will have more of a motive to bring you down. And if you fall, you'll fall harder. But people without that sort of platform are often dishonest in less obvious ways. We live in a very dishonest culture. Are you going along with it or against it?