Sunglasses
This past Sunday at church, they had invited a guest speaker to come in. Usually, the pastor is very careful about who he lets on the stage to speak. Overall, in the type of large church that this is, it might not be a bad policy. That being the case, however, I’m not sure how this “guest speaker” managed to get up there… or maybe I can.
Within a few minutes of his getting up there and starting to speak, I simply wanted to leave. I just couldn’t, because I was the sound guy!
So much of what he said “sounded good”, but was just off enough to make my skin crawl. The speaker was Brian Klemmer, apparently a well known motivational, “positive thinker” type of speaker that charges people lots of money for going to his seminars.
The one thing I did like from his speech was his analogy of how most people are “born with sunglasses on”, and live their lives while never taking them off. As a result, no matter what you say to them, they can never see things for what they are – they just simply don’t know any better. The only way to change people’s thinking is to get them to take off the sunglasses.
This made sense to me, as it seems that for many years I was wearing those sunglasses. They were the sunglasses of Christianity. Not only were they tinted, but they were also distorted. A few years ago, some of the everyday things in life made them fall off – and that certainly caused some confusion!
Ever since then, nothing seems the same. And once you have removed cheap, distorted sunglasses, there is no way you can go back to wearing them.
The problem is that with Brian Klemmer it seems that he hasn’t actually removed his sunglasses. Instead he has either replaced them with a different tint, or simply rubbed and cleaned the old ones so much that they are now scratched as well. All of his training seminars simply try to make your sunglasses match the ones he is wearing.