speak for publication

my dad is one of my heros. he is a man of great integrity and incredible generosity. one of many pieces of wisdom he has shared with me is summarized in this sentence . . . 

 "only speak for publication." 

in other words, never say anything to anyone about anything that you would not want publicized for everyone to read/see. WOAH. pretty intense thought, i know. . . but the more i go through life, the more i see that what we say--no matter how private we may think it is--always makes it's way into the light of public awareness. and all-too-often, what we say in any given moment isn't something we want to be remembered by for a millennium.

fascinatingly seth godin writes it this way "google never forgets." in case we don't get the point, he goes on to write that "everything you do now ends up on your permanent record . . . act (speak) is if you are on candid camera, because you are." so what does seth prescribe as an antidote for the bad stuff we're often linked to? "the best plan is to overload google with a long tail of good things . . ." 

in this age of digital memory, where every part of our lives can be exposed--often through a powerful search engine called google--nothing we say or do is forgotten, whether it is a picture being broadcast on facebook of our night-out-on-the-town, a detail we fudged on our monster resume, or a foolish comment we made that is immortalized in the blogosphere . . . we are exposed by who we are in every moment . . . not just our good moments. so the moral is: who we are in every moment must increasingly be good. of course, none of this is new insight . . . check out the words of Jesus.

the good news: because none of us is good all the time (i.e. we've all done/said stupid stuff), we can instead choose to walk humbly with each other in the light of God's grace. then, and only then, even our google-sized failings are forgotten in God-sized forgiveness.