The Bible is full of reminders that those who live God’s ways conspicuously will have the attention of the world, and that this is not an accident. Towards the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:14-16, Jesus said: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Nor is this all, for Proverbs 22:29 tells us: “Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before unknown men.” Indeed, one aspect of our generation that is surprisingly close to this ideal is the way that ordinary people, whose lives were obscure and private before, have turned their own lives into public performance, putting much of their behavior and their worldviews before the entire world, for credit and blame. This is unlikely to be due to any conscious desire to fulfill any scriptural mandate, but it reminds us that what we dislike about our culture does not always square with what God does or does not expect of us.

Not everyone wants to live in a city on a hill, though. Yesterday, for example, I was reading a book about the forlorn last outposts of British imperialism, and among those islands there was one whose people were deeply friendly, but also deeply private. Upon finding out that the author was a journalist, he was viewed with great suspicion by the people there, because they were concerned that he would take their private lives, their romances, their personal business, and put it in print, where they would have to live with it for decades, long after what was written about ceased to have any sort of great personal importance. He was reminded rather forcefully that they would have to live with his words for a long time, long after he had moved on to other assignments, and so he had better be sure to write wisely. This is good advice for any reader, especially among those of us whose writing tends towards the journalistic in nature, towards writing annals and accounts of daily existence, what we experience and what we observe. It behooves those of us who write about personal matters to write in such a way that those who have to live with our words, including we ourselves, do not have cause for regret in what we say.

This morning, as I went about my daily reporting, I was asked by one of the IT employees which time today would be best for my desk to be moved to its twelfth location, right in front of my boss’ boss. My reply to this query was that there was no particularly good time, but that the best time today would be during my working lunch meeting. Shortly after this, I received an e-mail from the executive in front of whose office my desk was to be relocated to, who commented that she hoped I considered this a step up and that she wanted me to be easily accessible to others, that my knowledge and expertise have a wider and more convenient audience. I must admit that my feelings were strongly ambivalent about the request, an ambivalence that is reflected in many aspects of my personal life. Factors that for many people are of no great importance are for me highly important, given that I especially hate having people approach me suddenly from behind, as that is something that is a rather ferocious trigger for my PTSD [1].

In many ways, my ambivalence to personal attention is a consistent aspect of life. For reasons not entirely clear to me, many of the talents that I work very assiduously to develop and hone are talents that draw a great deal of personal attention. Whether it is my gregarious and outgoing natural personality with a loud voice, or whether it is my skills in singing and performing music, or in writing, or in my skills in formatting and presenting data, the very practice and development and use of my God-given talents leads to a great deal of attention. Regardless of what I do, by being myself I draw a large amount of attention to myself. Yet this attention, at a deep and fundamental level, is simultaneously deeply unwanted. For although by nature I am friendly to all who are around me, I am also by nature, and even more strongly by nurture, a deeply shy person who feels deeply uncomfortable under the intense gaze of others, however intense my own gaze may be at all that is around me. Given the fact that the attention that others pay to me is the source of a great amount of personal stress, it is all the more ironic that the way I live tends to bring much of that attention, whether good or bad, on me, without giving me the enjoyment of it.

It must be admitted that we live in a world where privacy is scarce and rapidly decreasing. Some of it is due to the fact that we live in a world where the electronic surveillance of behavior is at such a level that we all have a lot of data about ourselves that is readily accessible, including video footage of our shopping, debit and credit card trails, electronic trails based on our e-mails and phone calls and other communications, and so on. Yet much of that is due to ourselves. Most of us live in such a way that we draw a lot of attention to ourselves. Whether it is posting the locations that we are at, or posting photos about ourselves in various activities, or whether it is being prolific bloggers whose mundane daily lives of doing work or reading books or going to the library and so on become archived for permanent retrieval whenever anyone wishes to find out about our lives or merely stumbles upon it while looking for something else that we may happen to quote or reference in what we have written. Often we are our own worst enemies, acting at direct cross-purposes with what we claim to want [2].

How are we to resolve these conflicts within ourselves? It is one thing to want to live a quiet and peaceful life, at least as quiet and peaceful as one can live as someone like myself. It is another to know that one’s compulsion to develop and practice according to the gifts that one has been given will lead to a lot of attention, whether it is wanted or not, simply because the people in this world are often quick to recognize and desire to benefit from the gifts of those that they happen to encounter around them. It is yet another thing to know that our behavior, regardless of our intentions in the matter, manages to draw a lot of attention to ourselves aside from that which would be drawn simply by our being ourselves and living as best as we are able wherever God happens to place us. How are we to enjoy it? How are we to live in such a way that our living according to our purpose for existence and our own particular blend of qualities and character and personality brings glory to God and brings us a sense of accomplishment and pleasure? For if, despite our wishes, we are to live in a city on a hill before the gaze of the world, we should at least enjoy what has been appointed for us, and not consider it a source of continual torment and difficulty.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/a-week-to-remember-a-week-to-forget/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/08/15/book-review-kill-the-silence/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/try-me-and-know-my-anxieties/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/its-no-surprise-to-me-i-am-my-own-worst-enemy-part-one/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/12/06/its-no-surprise-to-me-i-am-my-own-worst-enemy-part-two/