A Sermon to Remember

When I worked in television, I was a master control operator. On Sunday morning that meant I had to sit through about five or six religious programs. Let’s see if I can remember them: Niven Miller, Day of Discovery, Jimmy Swaggart. There were a few more. Let’s just say that I have heard a lot of sermons in my life.

One of the best sermons, yet one of the scariest, was given by Barry Boucher, who was then pastor of The Life Centre in Ottawa.

He talked about the three persons that exist in you.

The first is the person that you know and you know that others know. This is you that you show the world.

The second is the side of you that you know that nobody else knows. This is the secret side of you. It includes thoughts and actions that few if any know about. Oscar Wilde wrote about this person in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The third is the scary one. This is the you that others perceive, but you don’t know about. You may say or do something without knowing how it received by somebody else. It may be something wonderful that elevates you in the eyes of others or bad that leads to difficulties. The key is you are totally ignorant about it.

It’s sort of like somebody coming up to you and telling you that they had a crush on you thirty years ago. You didn’t have the foggiest idea and may or may not have wanted to know way back then.

While I remember this part of the sermon, I forget what the main point was. I think it was that you need to be more and more like the first person. God knows you inside out, so hiding yourself doesn’t do much good. I have no idea what the spin was on the third person, but I do know I walked out of the church with a real desire to know how others see me – the me that I don’t know.