Split Personality

In other commentaries, I have refereed to my many businesses over the years. One large building I owned contained a private club which would hold seven hundred people. One Saturday night, always the busiest night, the manager was sick and my bookkeeper told me I should go to the club to lend an air of gravitas to the place. I am not a club person. I do not drink, dance, gossip or any of the other things that go on in a social setting. When I was in the club, there was no doubt in any one's mind about who owned the place. I always had on a tuxedo with a dinner jacket. I was standing near the entrance desk where every member signed in with guests when two large black women came on the scene dressed in gowns , furs, and jewelry. I had a small shadow of vision in one eye, but I had never seen anything like this before. After they passed on, I said to a bouncer, “who were they?” He said, “those are two well known, well heeled, black drag queens from a nearby town. They're automobile mechanics, they own a large garage. Their fantasy world, their other world, is dressing like women on a Saturday night. They own a stretch limousine and use a chauffeur, and each Saturday night they go to one gay friendly club in the area, dance, party and have a good time. Once a week, they become a new personality, black, beautiful woman dressed in gowns and jewelery, heels and wigs. They leave their coveralls, brogands, and automobile grease behind. They ride in the back of their car, and a friend dressed in a black tux is their chauffeur.”

When God gave us freewill, he gave us an escape mechanism wherein we can be several personalities. When you meet someone, do you actually know what personality you are meeting? My cousin told me that her husband is so religious in church - great singer, loud in prayer. She said however, “as soon as he gets in the automobile and starts driving home, he is a different personality. Road rage takes over. He is cursing and condemning all the inept drivers around him.” One mother, overheard her daughter praying before bedtime. The daughter said, “God please help my mother be as nice at home as she is at church.”

Even the bible, dictated by God, written by human genius, men who themselves possess foibles of personalities. Christ, God-man, perfect in every way, chose twelve Jews, so imperfect. The Christian church has seen a slow seepage of commitment because of the tantalizing worldliness brought on by technology. Much of Christianity has become lip service. If only the faith loudly proclaimed inside the church building, survived daily activities in the world. Does your employer, fellow employees, neighbors, see the Christ you proclaim within the Church walls? If every church member were just like me, what kind of church would my church be? If every Christian were just like me, what kind of world would my world be?

The greatest thing of the split personality is the imagination. We can endure most anything, if we can imagine things will improve. A sick person can always imagine how they felt when well. A person on the battlefield can always imagine the serenity of home. As a boy, windows up at night during the summer, I could hear the frogs in the large cow pasture across the road in front of our home. I always imagined that symphony erasing military sound. Einstein said, “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” The beginning ball player must imagine himself as a national hero. The beginning medical intern must imagine himself as a successful practitioner, a researcher named in headlines of a prestigious, professional journal. All successful men imagine a large car in the driveway at a beautiful home. You will not go any further than your dreams and imagination. As long as Great Britain imagined itself as the great superpower of the world (the sun never set on English soil), as long as Britain imagined it won wars, England progressed. Now, it has withdrawn into a quivering vestigial island, it's greatness a figment of the imagination of its people, British empire sold out to sociological entitlements.

John Wayne, in one of his famous movies, said, “You are scared to death, but you saddle up anyway.” We call upon the inner man of courage to face life and its many challenges. I believe the Christian faith is 95% courage. It takes courage to live Christ-like. It does not take much courage to pretend within the walls of the church house. The true test of Christianity is living your faith in front of your family, friends, and neighbors. Saint Francis of Assis said, “You preach everyday, use words if necessary.” The greatest books in the world have been written because of fantasy, the split personality bringing ideas and ideals into our very existence. It took an overwhelming Christian faith for totally blind Fannie Crosby, to write eight thousand hymns (Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross). The greatest symphonic and choral music in the world, written by those with a Christian heritage, a knowledge of the psalms, Handel's Messiah. What type of intelligence and skill does it take to write the lyrics or music we find in modern rap music? What type of mind produces rap music, comic books, or even ideas promoted in media, the film, and pornography industries which have completely derailed academia. Some academics, some judiciary, in the name of political correctness, have made every perversion, every moral compromise, acceptable. Did we ever think, in the American experiment, that the time would come that the bridges of total unacceptable behavior would be crossed, such as the justification of the almost complete annihilation of native Americans as in the American Indian Wars (an actual photograph, one of the earliest photographs, an Indian baby still nursing her mother who had been shot by Americans), the shame of slavery, the elimination of prayer from the classroom, the acceptance of abortion and euthanasia, and the selling out of free enterprise to social control (communism). For the American patriot, the devoted Christian, it takes a cataclysm reversal in the mind, a total split personality, to justify some things.

One of the world's greatest atheists, Christopher Hitchens, is dying of cancer. He has reportedly said “I have tried to separate superstition from science.” His brother, Peter Hitchens, is a great Christian and often debated his brother in public. Christopher Hitchens once said, “I do not believe in God. I hate God.” It is such double talk, such speaking out of both sides of the mouth, that we find constantly in political, pastoral, even commercial life. When the holy spirit of God possesses us, our minds, if not our bodies and our entanglements with the world, have been cleaned. The great Prince of Preachers, Charles Spurgeon, once said (I attended the Great Spurgeon church every time I was in London, The only preacher whose sermons were reprinted in their entirety in British newspaper on Monday), “You do not have to point out a person's unfaithfulness anymore than you have to point out a crooked stick. Just lay a straight stick next to the crooked stick.”