Modesty

When government officials in the state of Georgia decided to streamline the licensing process by allowing drivers to upload their own photos, they didn’t anticipate the unintended consequences. But recently, they decided to be a bit more, er, explicit in their instructions.

A recent Facebook post from the Georgia Department of Driver Services read, “Attention, lovely people of the digital era. Please take pictures with your clothes on when submitting them for your Digital Driver’s License and IDs.”

Because social media is often a domain for memes and practical jokes, people questioned whether the need for such clarification was warranted, but officials insisted they had indeed received a significant number of photos where the subjects were in various stages of undress. “It’s real, and it’s insane,” read one official response.

Still, the people responded with jokes and asked for more instructions: One wrote, “How much clothing? I feel like y’all are asking a lot in a vague way.” Others said, “I have questions … Enough to raid the fridge at midnight? Enough for a trip to Walmart? Brooks Brothers’ suit?”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In our social media age people expose every detail of life for wide consumption, but that's not how God intended us to live. Some things should remain private.

They say that beauty is only skin deep, but many studies have shown that we have an inherent bias to view attractive people as better, smarter, and more socially competent. This strong attractiveness bias impacts everything from hiring decisions, to how highly students rate professors, to how well students are treated by their teachers.

This bias is especially strong in our 21st century dating scene. As an example, the comedy writer Ali Reed created a fake profile on the dating site OK Cupid for a woman she called "AaronCarterFan." (Aaron Carter, for the uninitiated, is the younger brother of a Backstreet Boy.) Then she loaded her profile with despicable traits, including "enjoys kicking cups out of homeless people's hands," and "my parents think I'm in law school so they pay all my bills—LOL," and "you should message me if ur rich." But for the online photo Reed used the real photo of a friend who's a professional model.

What happened to the beautiful but decadent fake "AaronCarterFan"? Reed said, "[She] did very well. In the first 24 hours she got 150 messages. I had the profile up for two or three weeks, and she had close to 1000 men message her. She got probably 10 times the number of messages that my real profile got."

Shyness and disorganization are not traits most people want in corporate executives. Neither is being honest about such traits in front of global media. But Phil Libin, chief executive of (ironically enough) digital note-taking and organization company Evernote, freely admits that he is "not particularly good at many facets of his job." He is "cripplingly shy." Libin says, "If I'm at a party, I'm usually the guy standing to the side pretending to check emails on my phone. But I'm trying really hard to get better. I have handlers who point me at the right person to talk to."

Libin never had a management job before the success of the business launched him and a close team of fellow programmers to be big news. Even that choice—Libin as CEO—came because he was the weakest programmer on the team. But Libin also knows his strengths. He recently said, "I suppose that what I'm better than most at is pulling together other people's good ideas in a whole."

Possible Preaching Angle:

His modesty is honest, and a reminder that it's not only our strengths that define us, but that defying expectations is actually a way to redefine them.

At the age of 19, Kylie Bisutti beat out 10,000 other contestants in the 2009 Victoria's Secret Model Search contest. But Bisutti said that getting married and growing in her Christian faith caused her to see her career in a different light. In an interview Kylie said,

[The modeling world] is a very hard industry to be in without falling into things you don't want to do …. It's a very tempting industry …. Victoria's Secret was my absolutely biggest goal in life, and it was all I ever wanted career-wise …. [But] I'm a Christian, and reading the Bible more, I was becoming more convicted about it …. My body should only be for my husband, and it's just a sacred thing. I didn't really want to be that kind of role model for younger girls because I had a lot of younger Christian girls that were looking up to me and then thinking that it was OK for them to walk around and show their bodies in lingerie to guys. It was pretty crazy because I finally achieved my biggest dream, the dream that I always wanted, but when I finally got it, it wasn't all that I thought it would be.

Hip-hop music artist Mary J. Blige was asked the following question in an interview: "Mary, you're a devout Christian; how do you reconcile bling with God?"

She responded: "My God is a God who wants me to have things. He wants me to bling! He wants me to be the hottest thing on the block. I don't know what kind of God the rest of y'all are serving, but the God I serve says, 'Mary, you need to be the hottest thing this year, and I'm gonna make sure you're doing that.' My God's the bomb!"

Winston Churchill was once asked, "Doesn't it thrill you to know that every time you make a speech, the hall is packed to overflowing?"

"It's quite flattering," replied Sir Winston. "But whenever I feel that way, I always remember that if instead of making a political speech I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big."

Kim Alexis was one of the first American supermodels in the 1980s. She was on over 500 magazine covers, including Vogue and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Then on January 21, 1990, Alexis asked Jesus to take control of her life. Now she counsels women to avoid some of her mistakes.

She says, "Many women are playing with fire in the way they dress. Dressing like a floozy tells the world, 'Look at me, want me, lust after me. I'm easy and you can have me.' Displaying intimate parts of the body is a form of advertising for sex."

"Dressing modestly tells the world, 'I respect myself and I insist on being treated with respect." Alexis says, "It is possible to be stylish and attractive without wearing something that is too short, low-cut, or see-through."

Legendary basketball coach John Wooden turned 90 on October 14, 2000. The Wizard of Westwood led his UCLA men's basketball teams to ten national championships—seven of them in a row. Although his condominium is filled with photos, trophies, and plaques, there is one he treasures above the others.

"When I graduated from Purdue, I received the Big Ten medal as the senior athlete with the highest grade–point average," he told a reporter. "I did that. The other awards, my teams won."