I'm a Fake!

While folding laundry one day I caught a few minutes of a Rock Hudson movie. He played a man who sold fishing equipment in a sporting goods store. He told people the best gear to buy, the best place to fish, the best bait to use, even the best time of day to fish. Then it was discovered that he didn’t personally fish, or even know how! He just passed on information that others had given him.

I thought, that is so my life! I work in a longarm quilting business selling quilting supplies. I spend my days advising people on the best products to buy, telling them how to use it, and am even considered "the expert" by some. But I don’t quilt!! I don’t personally use these products or have any real experience with them. I just pass on information that people tell me.
Something about this isn’t right.

We can know a lot about a lot of things. But there is no substitute for real experience. Only then can you really know a thing. (And even then, only your limited experience of it.)

I worry that the gospel can be like that. We can know all about it, how to live it, where to practice it, but not have any real experience with it. We can talk about faith, charity, service, sacrifice, Spirit, saving the world, but how much personal experience do we have with those things?

"It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at secondhand, either verbally or in writing. It is revelation to the first person only and hearsay to every other."
--Thomas Paine

Especially in the gospel were we meant to have first-hand experiences!

I do believe the Church encourages us to act "as if" we have a virtue before we actually possess it, such as to act with charity before we may actually feel it. It may be viewed as hypocrisy, but I see it as a learning step, a practice phase. It's meant to be temporary until we gain the virtue. All of us at divers times and places are "practicing" Christians. Permanence of the discrepancy qualifies for being a fake.


It makes me all the more grateful for the Savior, who left His heavenly home and came to earth to experience mortality first-hand. He knows what it is to be hungry, tired, rejected, and unappreciated. What He knows of our struggles and sufferings is not from hearsay.

Dennis Rasmussun wrote:
“Christ came among men to share what he had brought with him from heaven, but also to share what he would find on earth.
The gift he brought was eternal life with all its glory; the gift he received was human life with all its struggles.
Because He lived and suffered and died, life and suffering and death were changed. By sharing them he transfigured them, and made them ministers of perfection.”

We have faith in Christ because we know He has walked the walk, that He knows from personal experience about the things He teaches us. We know we can follow in His footsteps.


The lesson for me is, whether in fishing, quilting or living the gospel, it is infinitely better to do it, to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk.


The Lord has said, Do not be a hypocrite.

In other words, Don't be a fake.

What things do you know from experience, and what things do you know just from hearsay?