1000 Personas Part 2: The Lie

This is a continuation of our last post: Your 1000 Personas.

It goes back to the very first lie.

Adam and Eve were living in the fullness and presence of God and they were protected by God from something called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That was God's boundary. That was God saying, "This isn't for you, and it's not because I'm trying to keep something from you. It's because I'm trying to protect you."

Then Satan came and told them a lie. He said they were less than what they actually were, that if they knew what God knew, they'd be like God. They wouldn't have to depend on Him anymore. They'd be enough on their own.

That was the first time they knew shame. Before that moment, there was no shame. Adam and Eve walked around naked and unashamed because they lived in the presence of God and they trusted Him completely. The moment they ate from that tree, the moment they accepted that lie about being less than and needing to be more, everything changed.

Shame became the consequence of living outside of God's design, and it reduced Adam and Eve from the multidimensional people they were to the one persona the world sees today.

We're living in the battle between being a child of the Most High and a sinner whose shame says they have no value. We've let ourselves be reduced to a single version when we were created to be so much more. Adam and Eve became the scapegoat for that first failure, but we're no different. We're doing the exact same thing they did, and we're doing it on a platform that's designed to do it faster.

Social media has become the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It distills us down to one persona, for good or for bad, and we feed into it as a human race.

We see it happening in real time, how it can be used for manipulation, both for inspiration and for the worst kind of self-gratification. Athletes are using it to profess their faith more openly now, and that's beautiful. But at the same time, the algorithm is also encouraging us to pursue self-gratification, to believe that our needs and wants and desires are more important than community, than society, than God.

It's a constant battle between pursuing self and pursuing God's life for you, His design for you, His desires for you.

I got an invitation to Masterclass the other day, and there's a course about escaping the addiction to dopamine that social media creates. Thirty days to gaining control and the ability to focus without distraction. And I thought about how that ties into the persona thing, because it's hard to know who you really are when you're constantly distracted.

It's hard for my wife and my daughter to know who I am when I can't stay engaged, when I check out. That becomes one of my personas: the cold, uninterested guy who's not really present. And then, when people start comparing the version of you they know to the version everyone else seems to see and start asking: “Why can't you be like that version?” “If they only knew you like I know you.” Those are vulnerability killers, and they're happening every single day on social media.

The key to people knowing the thousand versions of you is walking into a place of vulnerability first. You have to practice it. You have to be encouraged to do it, because vulnerability is terrifying. But I've found that vulnerability becomes easier when you feel like you have nothing to lose, when you've lived so long in failure that you don't care anymore what people think. That can actually be a very powerful place. It can be a gift.

And that's precisely why social media tries to divide us into camps. Us and them. If you don't think like us, you're one of them. That's when the shame cycle starts, when we start pointing at each other. And that's how evil flourishes. That’s how “the other” becomes your enemy.

The fullness of who we're supposed to be gets whittled down to a single-dimensional identity. Liberal or conservative. Black or white. Which tribe are you in? You have to ask yourself, are you one dimensional? Or do you have a thousand personas?