When You Find Out You Sound Like a Jerk

    Have you ever had the experience of doing something, and thinking you had done it well, until someone else came along with a fresh perspective and told you you hadn't done such a great job? This has happened to me before, and I try to make myself double check every time. After all, there's always the possibility of me being wrong.

    Well, I've been doing this blog for a while now, and one of my best friends just read some of my most recent material and told me that I sounded arrogant in my blog. I didn't believe him. But there was the chance (as always) that I could turn out to be wrong, so I went back and reread a couple of my posts - and almost melted into the carpet.

    He was right.

    I couldn't believe myself. Even I didn't want to take myself s seriously, let alone finish reading  the article. As I read with reader's eyes, I could recall my sentiments and my good intentions, the careful selection of words and phrases to avoid offending people, to sound conversational, to conserve time and page space - but I could also see the very unexpected result of that effort spilling out in front of me, rolling in the opposite direction that I had intended. My curtness turned to brusqueness. My conversational phrasing turned into snide quips. My passion wore a false mask of hate. Where did this come from? Did I write this?

    Have you ever watched a toddler use crayons? Many of them are incredibly meticulous, leaning in, squinting at the construction paper, putting in the effort - only for their labors to produce an incomprehensible mess of lines, dots and scribbles, 10% of which end up on the table rather than the paper. Effort does not equal immediate accomplishment of the goal.

    I have labored to make this blog as polite and cordial as possible. I have tried hard to avoid writing in offensive ways. But like the toddler, I'm finding I'm not very good at it, so my efforts don't produce the desired result.

    But every once in a while, we get to watch a toddler's scribbles turn into a child's messy stick figures and boxy house drawings, and then perhaps into the intelligent gestures and sketches of an adolescent's hands - which might one day become the masterpieces of the next Michelangelo.

    I'm not very good at sounding like I'm not a jerk. But I try not to, and it breaks my heart when I fall down on the job. And as long as I have good friends (and readers), who are willing to tell me (for my own good) when I sound bad, I can rub out my scribbles and try to draw a straighter line.

    So, hopefully, I'll be sounding much less like a jerk soon. I'm a work in progress.

    Thank God for Christian brothers and sisters.