I told you not to be like those who attract attention to their giving and their praying, announcing it with fanfare or doing it as a public performance. Rather when you give you should not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and you should shut yourself in your closet and pray in secret to your Father and in both cases he will reward you openly. Why hide the good things that you do? One benefit is to purify your motives. Can you be indifferent to even your own thoughts about how people view your actions if they are done in public?

Are you familiar with the concept of a strawman? If you take the worst example you can find of your enemies, and assume that they are all alike and are all this bad it is easy to dismiss them as evil, but this is a dishonest approach and a classical fallacy based on the rules of logic alone. Strawmen have no defense and are easily defeated. Have you ever seen anyone make a strawman of me? People reject me based on misconceptions that they create themselves. They create an image of me as distant, judgmental, harsh, exacting, and indifferent. Do you see me this way?

Have you ever raised objections? These can happen casually in everyday life and are frequent, but the term has a formal meaning in legal proceedings. If an attorney for one side of a court case doesn’t like something the other side does with respect to process, they can raise and objection and the judge rules sustained or overruled. Have you ever raised objections with me? What if I let someone into the Kingdom of God that you don’t think meets the entrance criteria? Will you raise an objection? What ruling would you expect the judge to give in such a case?

Do you like to travel? Do you go as a tourist or an explorer? It is possible for affluent people to travel as if they never left home. An industry exists to provide familiar comforts in faraway places to those who can afford them, and those who take this approach can go places without ever engaging with the local people or learning about their manners, customs, and way of life. But those who go to explore will find a richer and more rewarding experience. Do you think the people in the places you visit can tell which sort of traveler you are?