Many are simply "faking it" in life. A gal asked her friend, "Are you happy?" He said, "yes," and she asked, "why don't you tell your face?" Mary Alice and I were going down to Houston and went through a small wide place in the Texas road and stopped at a small restaurant, owned evidently by a local female character. As we were drinking our coffee, a cowboy with worn hat and boots came sauntering over, gave me one of those wonderful Texas smiles, and in his twang said, "ain't you Fred Smith?" I admitted it, since he didn't look like the sheriff, and then, too, in my stage of senility, I'm always glad to be reminded of who I am ‘cause I do forget. Following my confession, he continued: "I read your stuff in Leadership." Delighted to meet a reader, I asked a few things about his reaction to the magazine and then asked him how things were going. Very enthusiastically he said, "great, see that church over there on that corner? I'm pastor there." He was a cowboy turned pastor. Then he told me about the great revival he had recently, at which point I said, "I'm so happy to hear it, because in dealing with the 300,000 pastors who read Leadership I find so many of them depressed." He looked away, got right quiet, and then looked back and said, very seriously, "to tell you the truth, I'm resigning next Sunday night and my wife and I are getting a divorce and I'm leaving the Baptist church and going to be a Methodist pastor." He was at bottom—and I don't say that just because he's leaving the Baptist church. He was hurting but he was faking it. Most of us have developed ways to fake it. The young are saying, "help me make it through the night. " We adults have our own songs to sing.
Howard Rome, once head of the world psychiatric society, said that Thoreau was right when he said, "most people are living lives of quiet desperation." Recently, reading a survey of doctors as to what percentage of the patients really needed to be in their office, they agreed it was somewhere around 10%. When the doctors were asked what they wished they could do rather than hurry them through, give them a placebo or a tranquilizing pill, they said, "talk to them about their personal life, for this is what is really wrong." When Dr. Price was president of the AMA, he and I were speaking to a convention at the greenbrier. He's a pediatrician from Florence, South Carolina. In a chat he was telling me about the most important prescription he felt he had ever written. It happened when parents brought a disturbed 10-year-old in for examination. He examined the boy, talked to the mother, talked to the father, and then called the father back in and said, "your son is sick but it is emotional, not physical. I am going to give you a prescription if you will have it filled and see that it is carried out." The father agreed immediately, "I'll assure you it will be filled and carried out." Then Dr. Price took his prescription pad and wrote, "one baseball, two gloves," and handed it to the father. The doctor recognized that this boy was not going to make it — that a father's attention would take that first step toward releasing the boy's attempt to fake it.
Whether it is "name it and claim it" or "fake it until you make it" — it all ends up empty in the nighttime. Who can you be real with today?
