“It’s no exaggeration to say we’ve become a selfie-obsessed culture.”

A thought by Craig Groeschel (2015-10-27) from his book, #Struggles: Following Jesus in a Selfie-Centered World (p. 70). Zondervan. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

I know you know what a selfie is but for those who don’t Craig says, “You can take a picture of yourself, and if you need to touch it up a little, you can apply a filter. Most smart phones now have filter tools that let you fix those little problem areas. You can change the color saturation, brighten the image, soften it, or make it black and white. You can even get rid of red-eye and erase that second chin! You can even change the color of your eyes and raise your cheekbones.”

He also said, “As of October, 2013, on various forms of social media, people had posted forty-one million pictures that included the hashtag #Selfie somewhere in the caption. You read that right: forty-one million.  And that number continues to explode. The selfie hashtag has since grown more than 200 percent in usage since January of 2013 (at which time it wasn’t even in the top 100 most commonly used hashtags on Instagram).”

You ask, what is a hashtag?  That is for another day.

Craig continues, “Selfies seem harmless enough, but I’m starting to wonder how our selfie-obsession might be changing how we relate to one another. For example, the more filtered our lives become— the more we show others only the ‘me’ we want them to see— the more difficulty we have being authentic. One recent study links an alarming increase in plastic surgery to patients’ desires to get the ‘perfect selfie.’”

Craig later says, “We’ve become skilled at filtering our lives, showing others only what we want them to see. This tendency is part of our sinful nature. When we’re insecure, when we don’t feel good about ourselves, and perhaps most of all when we sin, instead of confessing, which would set us free and heal us, we tend to hide, to put on a veil, to filter our lives.”

The key is Christ came to set us free, to love us, accept us and to forgive us.  So that we can do that to others.

So do you accept the real you?