Moses, in Exodus 2:22, said that he had become “a foreigner in a foreign land.”  Those words came to me the other day as I accompanied my brother and my son to a car show. I go to car shows on a regular basis, but none like this. Every car in this show, and there were hundreds, had been “slammed.”  I mean every one of them. Slamming a car means that you cut out the wheel wells, lower the geometry of the suspension so that the body of the car can rest on the ground, and then you put airbag suspension in them so that you can raise them enough to get on the road.  And then lower it again when you park.

       Oh, and every other car also had a bad case of negative camber. Do you see why I thought myself a foreigner in a foreign land? What does “negative camber” even mean? Negative camber is when the top of your car tire is closer to the car than the bottom of the tire is. Your tires wear a lot on the inside edge when this happens. Normal people go to Tire Kingdom to have that fixed. These people do it intentionally and in exaggerated ways to make the car look cartoonish.

        So here I am, a foreigner in a foreign land, and I find out that a big YouTuber car guy was there too. He is a native to this foreign land, I am not. I hadn’t even heard of him. He does one thing on YouTube, and one thing only. He stands next to a line of guys in their cars and takes a picture of a car, goes to the car behind it, and asks three questions. The first question is (as he shows the driver a picture of the car in front of him): “How would you rate this car from 1 to 10?”  Then he asks the driver how he would rate his own car. And finally, he asks a very insightful question: “How do you think other people would rate your car?”  He has done over 2000 of these. My brother got interviewed in his Toyota MR-2, I only got schooled in foreign car culture.

      I eventually got back to my own “Country” and looked up that YouTube guy. One or two videos went a long way for me. But the questions lingered. What if the videos weren’t about cars but about Jesus? What if somebody showed you a picture of Jesus, and asked you to rate how good Jesus was? And then they asked you how good do you think YOU are? And THEN they asked you how good do you think other people think you are? Or it could be something more vain: perhaps they show you a picture of the person in front of you and ask you to rate their looks. Then they ask you to rate your looks. Then they ask you how you think other people would rate your looks. What is the “delta” (as the engineers like to say) between the two numbers?

      Jesus had little patience for people whose delta (difference) was large. To the Pharisees, he said: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” (Matthew 23: 27) Ouch! They put on airs and thought of themselves 10 out of 10. But Jesus, and I would imagine most other people, could see right through that veneer. The “delta” was great between what was on the outside and what really was on the inside.

     All of us would rate our cars, or ourselves, highly. And some might agree with our assessment, and others not. Our culture teaches us to not care what others think of us. And while we don’t want to live a life trying to impress others and begging them to like us, sometimes putting ourselves in the shoes of others and focusing back on ourselves is a good exercise.

I want there to be continuity between what I think of myself, what I know of myself, and what others see in me, too. That kind of integrity is important. And matters to Jesus.

Back home,

Craig

Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out.
Proverbs 10:9 (NIV)