hypocrites

"Are we hypocrites?" my wife asked me the other day, on our way home from a small group meeting.

BIG question.

I remember when I first started attending small group meetings back 15-20 years ago, the word "hypocrite" often came to my mouth for no reason (sometimes during the middle of the night). Rather than interpreting this as a serious criticism or negative reaction to those nice people I was "fellowshipping" with (I was not officially a Christ follower then), I think it was more a reflection of my young, uncompromising heart that associated so closely with Jesus' harsh sentiment toward the Scribes and Pharisees, the hypocrites of his day, that is recorded in the New Testament. What a "joy"--for lack of better word, to hear Jesus call these fake people the living dead, walking coffins, snakes and vipers!

Then I grow older, see more things and experience more people, I get mellower, and I no longer burst out these words in my mind that often, nor as vividly as before when they do occur.

Instead, sometimes I wonder, if I am the hypocrite.

Do I say things that I don't do myself?

Do I pretend to be someone that I am not?

Take, for example, this occasion when my wife asked that firy question. It came after we had a vehement argument about how we treated our teen age kid, her 19-year old nephew, whom we took in 3 years ago and had just left for college last September. Long story short, he's not the great, nice behaving kid we expected him to be, we had both concluded long ago, and there were instances that made us both decide we had to be strict on him, to teach him some life lessons, so to speak. But now, after he had left home, my wife feels maybe we have been too harsh on him after all. "He's just a kid, really, no better and no worse than any other kids his age," she said. "Did we really give our care to him unconditionally, or did we do that only based on what suited us?"; "We talk about love all the time in front of other people, but have we really loved our kid enough?"

Though I tried to argue with her, in my heart I know what she said were true, as I have long pondered these questions myself and concluded the answers. We didn't really love him enough as parents should.

Am I a hypocrite then?

I guess I am.

The only solace I can take in this is that I know I am a hypocrite that knows himself to be one, and there is a higher standard that I can strive for, or, more accurately, a supreme power that I can rely on, to become a non-hypocrite one day.

Thank God for that.