Why am I here? Is faking it the same as making it?

Information overload: images of anything and everything, ‘experts’ selling the next new miracle cure, celebrities without talent created solely because of ‘likes’ and ‘hits’, and opinions masquerading as news.

Pray for mercy if your pictures aren’t taken at the right angle, your food choices not deemed healthy enough or you innocently say something that is not politically correct twenty years from now.

Our world is becoming more focused on the small stuff rather than the big picture.  At the end of your life, will the fact that you have documentation of every bite you ever ate, looked ah-ma-zing in all your Instagram pics (posted the 100 that looked good, took a million that didn’t make the cut), and kept your mouth (and mind) shut in order not to offend?    Are you anything less than perfect?  Will you ever be worthy of admiration here on Planet Earth?

It is an impossible standard and a completely useless waste of precious time–and life.  How many times have you seen a young woman at the beach with arm held out and slightly angled, taking selfie after selfie but never looking away from the screen long enough to see a dolphin jump or a crab running in the sand?  Or a family at a restaurant waiting not so patiently to eat while one person moves glasses and silverware around to set up the perfect picture of their food for SnapChat?  How many times have you posted ‘happy smiling couple’ pictures right after you had an incredible fight (but the lighting was so good and there was a great background and you wanted everyone to know you were staying at a four star hotel)?

We have lost our connection to each other.  We show a false happiness, read fake news, and are afraid to have any form of conversation other than surface-level.  We are scared of being different.  We share safe memes instead of civil debate.  We have become The Truman Show at best and The Stepford Wives at worst.

Life isn’t a perfect photo and it never will be.  People are dirty, hard-hearted, greedy, scared, and confused.  We are also filled with joy, laughter, kindness, compassion, love and beauty.  Life is unfair.  Rain falls on the just and the unjust.  Sunshine does too.  It is not possible as flawed human beings to live a perfect life, and it is too danged tiring to continually act like it is.

So, if not to achieve (and maintain) perfection in motion, what is our purpose?  Here are some:

1. Helping other people.  Everyone goes through good times and bad, and everyone, yes, every single person, has cried before, has laughed, has felt despair and joy.  We all go thorough births and deaths and all the messy stuff in between.  Sharing your life honestly and with compassion, messy as it is, is a great way to start.   Lonely?  Visit a nursing home and read to someone who is blind.  Contact a hospital about holding babies who are born addicted to drugs and suffer alone without anyone to care for them.  Volunteer at a soup kitchen and feed the hungry and homeless.  Smile at your neighbor.  A rope is stronger braided and it is much easier to go through life knowing you aren’t alone.
2. Becoming a better human.  We all have strengths and weaknesses but often become blinded to both when the focus is continually on ourselves.  Strengthen the good parts and shore up the weaker parts.  The good news is that helping others will also help ourselves become better people.  Compliment other people’s strengths, and treat others with compassion and patience with their weaknesses, just as you would like to be treated.  Iron does sharpens iron but be sure to do so with grace and mercy.
3. Equipping the next generation.  We all want legacy: to leave the world a better place.  There is no better way to do that than to teach the next generation how to survive and thrive.  Show them with your actions not just your words and be the person who stands in the gap for other people.  Strive to be strong but kind.  You never know who is watching you and what impact a small kindness on your part can have on others.  Think about ripples in a pond–you throw a rock in, and the ripples go outward until you can’t see where they are going but they are still creating motion underwater.

And in reality none of these will work without the main reason we are all here, and that is to honor God.  And we do so by doing all of the above.

Life isn’t a selfie at all, despite what the buzz is out there.  It’s a mosaic.   A beautiful one.