A few months back, I had a talk with a co-worker of mine whom I’ve known for many years. She and I actually worked together at my first station about ten years ago, then we were reunited when I moved to Charleston.

I was talking about church and how profoundly my friend Archie had touched me with his amazing faith, and she said something I haven’t been able to shake. She said, “It may not look like it at times, but my own faith is very important to me, so I totally get what you’re saying.”

This is the kind of person you’d call a backbone of her department. When something’s going wrong, she’s one of the first ones everyone runs to, because they know she’ll have a backup plan and make it work. A lot of the time, I’m one of those people, too, so I suppose that’s one reason why we get along so well. Being that type of person sometimes means you have to take charge, you have to be assertive. Sometimes, you have to cut through a lot of foolishness and snap everyone back to reality. Hopefully, it’s always done in a polite way. But the reality is that very often, in the heat of the moment, it isn’t.

So it just struck me when she said that “it may not look like it at times.” Because if God’s in our heart, it ought to always be obvious. Too often, we get in the way of that transparency.  We block that light from shining.

Last week, I was talking about some Easter weekend plans I had made to another co-worker. This one seemed caught off guard a little, and said, “I didn’t realize you were that religious.”

That was a reminder to me of how I let too much get in the way at times in my life and how I deal with people. It’s not that I’m a rude jerk at work. In fact, I bend over backwards not to be a rude jerk, and end up worrying all the time if I have offended someone. My biggest weakness tends to be getting stressed out, worrying about things that I can’t really control, worrying about why I can’t control them, and allowing myself to get pessimistic.

I know, I know, longtime readers…me? Pessimistic? Surely I jest.

I’m not suggesting that we Christians should spend every moment in public with a bible in hand, dressed in choir robes singing to the heavens. There are plenty of people less religious who are quite fine with the notion of a Christian not making any mention — or even leading anyone to believe in any way — that they even might be religious.

But there’s a challenge for those of us who’d call ourselves God followers: no matter whether we mention God or Jesus at all, no matter whether anyone ever sees us pray or runs into us at church somewhere, no one ought to be surprised to find out that we are God followers. Every time it happens, it’s a reminder to us that we still have a long way to go.

Not in trying to fix others, but in trying to fix ourselves.

Once a week, I meet with a close friend for coffee. We talk about a variety of subjects, religion making up a large part of the general conversation. As we part, we have a quick prayer together. It’s nothing ostentatious; we do it right outside our cars in the parking lot, not inside. One of the things we always pray about is that we wouldn’t do anything that would compromise our testimony as Christians.

Maybe a bigger part of that needs to be that we should act in a manner that would allow those around us to realize that we even have one.