Being Real

Anyone who knows me knows I am barely online. I have kept blogs on and off since I first had access to the internet, back in the Geocities era, and writing has always been my primary way of putting myself into words. But the internet I learned on and the internet that exists now bear almost no resemblance to each other.

Email, for years, meant one thing to me: pen pals.

Letters to actual people, composed with attention, sent to a specific recipient who would read them and write back. The blog was the other half of it, a place to think out loud. Both were intentionally slow– it was just part of the process. Then MySpace arrived, and Facebook after it, and something inverted. Connection stopped being an act you performed toward a person and became a condition you maintained toward an audience. You no longer wrote to someone. You posted, and people saw, or didn’t, and that almost became some kind of informalcurrency. Presence turned into metrics. The measure of whether you had connected became a number rather than a reply.

I never made that transition, and at this point I doubt I will.

What passes for participation now is “selfies” and lives and followers and likes, a culture of attention I have no appetite for.

I get more attention in person than I want already. So I have almost no digital footprint. Every so often I build a Facebook profile when I need to find people to play D&D with, and then it goes out the window again. Some of it, I suspect, is stubbornness. I am holding onto what the internet used to be, or at least what it was for me.

This week I introduced myself in a group, which took more nerve than it probably should have. And I was met with an accusation I had never once anticipated: that I was not real.

Not exaggerating, not embellishing. Not a person. People decided, from a paragraph, that I was a generated fabrication.

I did not know how to answer. How does anyone prove, digitally, that they exist? That they are not a machine? That they are who they say they are?

I have never faced this in person. Plenty of people meet me and put me on some pedestal I did not ask for, which I understand even less than the accusation, because I am not a model and I am not impressive and I am complicated in ways I do not hide. But at least they concede I exist. Online, the same qualities that get me elevated in a room get me dismissed as fictional.

My son told me to shrug it off. He may be right. I am still wrestling with it, however.

Scripture does not treat reputation as vanity.

A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches (Proverbs 22:1), and Ecclesiastes puts it more starkly still: a good name is better than precious ointment (Ecclesiastes 7:1). These are not concessions to human weakness. They are wisdom statements about the genuine value of being known accurately.

Paul takes it further into practice. When he organized the collection for Jerusalem, he deliberately appointed a companion to travel with the funds, and explained why: we aim at what is honorable not only in the Lord’s sight but also in the sight of man (2 Corinthians 8:20-21). He built structural safeguards specifically so that no one could accuse him of mishandling money. That is reputation management, undertaken openly, on the reasoning that a discredited messenger discredits the message.

So the instinct to correct a false account of yourself is not automatically pride. There is a version of it that is stewardship.

But then the same apostle writes something almost the opposite. With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself (1 Corinthians 4:3). He goes on: it is the Lord who judges, so pronounce nothing before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness (4:5).

Notice that Paul does not say the verdict does not matter.

He says the verdict is not yours to render, or mine, and it is not due yet. Vindication is deferred, not cancelled. Whatever is currently hidden will eventually be brought into the light by someone with jurisdiction and perfect information.

This reframes the itch to be believed. What I want, when I want to prove I exist, is a verdict rendered now by people who have neither the standing nor the evidence to render it. And Paul’s position is that such a verdict, even if I won it, would be worth very little.

One useful pattern I found recently sits in Nehemiah 6.

Sanballat and Geshem circulate an open letter accusing Nehemiah of building the wall as prelude to rebellion, of setting himself up as king. It is a fabrication, and it is public, and it is aimed at his reputation with the Persian court, which could have ended him.

His response is 4 clauses long: No such things as you say have been done, for you are inventing them out of your own mind (Nehemiah 6:8). One denial. No evidence produced, no witnesses called, no lengthy defense of his motives. Then a prayer, now, O God, strengthen my hands, and then he goes back to the wall.

The narrator tells us what the accusation was actually for. They all wanted to frighten us, thinking, their hands will drop from the work (6:9). The point was never to establish anything. The point was to make him stop building, and any hour he spent litigating his innocence was an hour off the wall. Answering at length would have accomplished exactly what the accusers wanted.

That is the thing I keep returning to…some accusations are not arguments. They are interruptions pretending to be arguments, and a thorough rebuttal is not a victory but a diversion.

There is a passage in Acts I had never connected to any of this until now.

At Lystra, Paul heals a lame man, and the crowd concludes the gods have come down in human form. They call Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes. The priest of Zeus brings oxen and garlands to sacrifice to them (Acts 14:11-13). Days later, that same population, worked on by outsiders, drags Paul out of the city and stones him and leaves him for dead (14:19).

The same crowd. Worship, then attempted murder, with almost nothing in between.

What happened was not that they revised their opinion based on new evidence. It is that they had never been in contact with Paul at all, only with a projection they had built and then replaced. Elevation and dismissal came from the identical source: a refusal to encounter the actual man in front of them.

Which makes the pedestal and the accusation two expressions of one error. Being told I am too impressive to be real and being told I am too impressive to be human are the same thing. Neither one has anything to do with me.

Peter uses a legal word. Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15). The noun is apologia, courtroom vocabulary, the formal answer a defendant gives to a charge. So a reasoned account of yourself is not only permitted but expected.

But look at what he places underneath it, in the same breath: having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame (3:16). And earlier: by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people (2:15). The silencing agent is conduct. The verbal defense sits on top of a life that has already been making the case.

Which explains, precisely, why this problem belongs to the internet and not to my kitchen.

In person, the primary apologetic is running constantly and involuntarily. People watch how I treat a server, how I handle being wrong, whether I am the same person on Thursday that I was on Sunday. Digitally, none of it transmits. All that crosses the wire is assertion, and assertion is the one thing that can be manufactured wholesale. The medium strips out exactly the evidence Peter says does the actual work, and then people are surprised that authenticity has become unverifiable.

Proverbs sets two verses side by side that flatly contradict each other: Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. And immediately: Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes (Proverbs 26:4-5).

The contradiction is deliberate and instructive. There is no rule available. There is only the requirement to discern which situation you are standing in, and the two situations look similar from the outside. Sometimes engagement dignifies nonsense and makes you a participant in it. Sometimes silence lets nonsense harden into accepted fact. Wisdom is knowing which.

Jesus embodies both. He stands silent before Herod and answers nothing (Luke 23:9). He also, struck by a guard during his trial, asks directly: if I have spoken wrongly, bear witness about the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me? (John 18:23). Same trial. Different moments.

I do not think I can prove I exist to people committed to the premise that I do not, and I no longer think I am obligated to try.

My son’s advice was probably the correct one, and my difficulty in taking it says more about my appetite for being understood than about the seriousness of the charge.

What I can do is the Nehemiah version. State the thing once, briefly, without building a case. Decline the invitation to spend hours off the wall. Pray for strengthened hands. Return to the work, which in my case is writing, and let the writing accumulate into the only evidence that has ever really answered this kind of question.

The verdict I want is not available now and would not be worth much if it were. It is deferred to someone who will bring to light the things now hidden, who requires no proof of my existence because he authored it, and who has never once needed me to establish my credentials before he would speak to me.