During a People Watching Moment

As a writer my pass time is people watching or listening. It’s a great way to build characters and real-life scenarios that allow people to feel as if the incident is happening in front of them. While people I observe may know that I’m listening it is curious to see the things that people talk about when they are trying to pretend to be enlightened and argue for their specific point. Tonight I ended up listen to two college students, a guy and girl, talking about their varying decisions on the upcoming election and the candidates themselves. It was interesting to see their opinions, between friends, flare up at times as they tried to show their positions. For the young man he tended to be afraid of only the conspiracies or inconsistencies that the media had pointed out in recent months as his determining factor to not vote, or choose one over the other. His chief fear was that one man would try to “take over the world” in his own words. The girl he spoke with seemed generally unconcerned about the same facts that scared him and that only seemed to upset him. Despite his obvious flaw in believing a conspiracy and not seeking the truth out for himself about the man he would vote for. On the other hand it started to scare me that he would vote for the opposite one the news hadn’t dragged through the mud as much. After a few laughs the tension died down. He laughed off that he “didn’t believe” what so much about what he was saying, but simply “making a point.” After listening for nearly thirty minutes and getting distracted from what I had planned to do, it became apparent that neither of them really understood the issues, or at least how to make a valid argument. It was shocking to find that the issues that they had been passionate about only minutes before didn’t matter, but were merely academic or intellectual fodder. Then I asked myself a simple question: Do I stand by my beliefs? For anyone a belief is something that you hold on to and it makes the basis for every one of our decisions. If we don’t believe in our own beliefs, what are we supposed to believe in. Belief without conviction is alive and it seems to be a prevalent issue among my own generation. Not more than 8 years ago I was knee deep in my own college experience. To know that I probably argued in the same passionate way years ago and then at some point did the complete opposite wouldn’t surprise me. I’d like to think that in the last few years I’ve actually stood behind my own words. Though how much of our words and thoughts are based on bad beliefs; twisted beliefs. I know that even in the American church there are several differing opinions on what to believe about a wide variety of subjects. All of those same beliefs would fall short when compared to the infallible Word of God. I guess that what I want to say is that we all have beliefs and those beliefs change as time goes on, but the same truths that God has given us in the Bible never change. In our own lives we attempt to change what God said because we can’t stomach it or we do it in order to please others. We need to stop apologizing, hiding His Word, or covering for God. He doesn’t want us to, He wants us to speak the truth that He gave us, not rewrite it. He wants us to hold our belief in Him as the only thing that we need. In the end if we have the faith to say we are a Christian, but not to actually back it up then we have nothing and we have lied to God in order that we can say in our own twisted worlds that we are okay when in fact we are nothing more than “good liars.”