Foolproofing Your Life by Jan Silvious

Author:Jan Silvious [Silvious, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-45925-1
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 1998-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL

I recently talked with a group of people who have found balanced, healthy lifestyles after realizing they were allowing themselves to be controlled by their fools. I asked, “What did you become when you were allowing your fool to define you?” (They knew what I meant by your fool and define because we had worked on their issues with their fools for some time.) I was overwhelmed with their honesty! One woman seemed to sum it up best when she said, “I knew I was in trouble when I became selfish, when I felt I had to lie just to get through whatever upheaval we were involved in. And then I became sick; I was physically sick all the time. They weren’t major illnesses but the kinds of infections that lay you low. I knew enough about life to recognize that my body, soul, and spirit were being destroyed, little by little.”

Each person I talked with painted a picture of someone he or she did not like, someone who had abdicated to another’s image of them, and they were ashamed of the result. These people never meant to turn out this way, but through the steady friction of rubbing against their fools, the result was evident, and they had reached the point where they knew something had to change.

A doctor friend of mine described what had happened to them this way: “When you relate to a fool, it’s not just irritating or abrasive; it will alter who you are. I work on furniture, and if I want to get rid of small imperfections or smooth out a rough place, I use a fine sandpaper, something that is coated with many small, fine grains. I think of those abrasive grains of sand as the people God uses in our lives to help us grow. Their presence is a challenge that we are better for having overcome. They are people who are different than we are, and as we emotionally rub against them, they help us get rid of some of our imperfections. We can be better for having interacted with them even if the situation wasn’t pleasant.

“There’s another kind of paper, and that’s the kind that alters the very appearance and contour of a piece of wood. If I want to change what this wood looks like, then I get out the coarse paper. It has very few grains, but the grains that are there are large and powerful. With a few swipes of the paper I can do some major damage. That’s what relating to a fool is all about.”

It was interesting to me that none of the people I talked with said that while they were in the thick of their involvement with their fools they were truthful, caring, kind, loving, or spiritual. And there is a reason for that. When you allow a fool to define who you are and you fail to correct his definition, you become the exact representation of who the fool says you are.

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