Impressionable
Naive is a word I’ve always associated with myself. You see, if I have no reason (usually from no experience to distrust) to believe you might be deceiving me, I’ll accept what you tell me as truth until I’m convinced otherwise, usually.
But people aren’t that way. Two innocent stories should help illustrate that. The first is from my child hood. My mom worked part time as a nurse and my father worked full time at a bank. So, in the summer when my sister and I were off school, my mom would have to make arrangements for someone to watch us when she left for work and until my dad could pick us up.
One summer, my mom made arrangements to take us to a neighbor’s house to be watched by a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids of her own - a girl about our age and a boy a few years older than us. The boy (I’ve long forgotten his name) convinced my sister and I that they were aliens stationed on earth to observe people. He’d show us objects and explain what they were “for”. One point, he even showed us the supports under their house and told us that it was the landing gear of their spaceship (from a timeline perspective, I think this was close to the first moon landing time).
This went on for several weeks (we were only there for a few hours a couple times per week) until we finally figured out he was feeding us a line. The remarkable part of the story was that he was making this up as he went on, keeping a straight face and, this is important, remembering enough details of what he said to support any subsequent questions.
The second example was me doing something similar to my mother-in-law. About 5 years after my wife and I got married, one of her cousins got married in San Antonio, Texas. I met them there (I came from a professional conference I attended elsewhere). The hotel we were at had a complementary breakfast. In the dining area was a TV tuned to a Latino station. When I got to the dining area, the TV was broadcasting a news show. I decided to interpret what we were hearing in the news story into English. I was making it up from whatever visual clues I saw on the TV as I went along. My mother-in-law commented that she didn’t know that I spoke Spanish. My wife gave her a deadpan look and said that I didn’t know Spanish.
In both cases, there was no malicious intent to deceive, just good natured fun. I hope that I had given my mother-in-law enough examples that she trusted me after being married to her daughter for 5 years. In the baby-sitting example, the boy was using his imagination to create an alternate world which all kids do.
Now that I’m an adult, deception seems to be a way of life for the secular world. Politicians seem to go out of their way to imply that things are better than they are or worse than they are or connected to something else all for their personal gain. This morning (1/15/2025), for example, I saw an article where a reporter for MSNBC was commenting on how the president elect was already failing. I thought “how can he be failing when he hasn’t been inaugurated yet”?
“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” - Colossians 2:8 ESV
“Whoever hates disguises himself with his lips and harbors deceit in his heart; when he speaks graciously, believe him not, for there are seven abominations in his heart; though his hatred be covered with deception, his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly. Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on him who starts it rolling. A lying tongue hates its victims, and a flattering mouth works ruin.” - Proverbs 26:24-28
I believe it is my duty to discern what is truthful from that which is meant to manipulate me. That requires me, regarding significant statements being made, to carefully consider what is being said and, likely, to do additional research to verify the applicability of the statement.
