Life
101- "You Tell on Yourself" Life
101- "You Tell on Yourself"
by Barry Johnson
I was digging through some old tapes of mine from our past minister and good friend Barry Johnson who had a dramatic impact on my life as our senior minister from First Community Church. He gave a series of sermon's entitled "Peace of Mind" back in 1991 which I found particularly helpful over the years. It wasn't until recently that I was thinking of this one particular sermon he gave on the Lessons of Life 101 given to him from an 87 year old man named Henry. If we were all as wise as Henry, we'd all live to be 87 years old.
You tell on yourself by the friends you seek,
by the very manner in which you speak,
by the way you use your leisure time,
by the way you spend each dollar and dime.
You tell what you are by the things you wear,
by the sort of things in which you care,
by the kind of things that make you laugh,
by the records that you play on your phonograph.
You tell what you are by the way you walk,
by the thing of which you like to talk,
by the manner in which you take defeat, and
especially by the way you eat.
By the books you choose from a well-filled shelf,
in thousands of ways you tell on yourself.
So there really isn't a bit of sense
in keeping up a false pretense.
- Henry