Here’s a snippet from a book, Passionate Presence, by Catherine Ingram:

Some years ago a young friend of mine, six years old at the time, walked up to me and said the following:”Pretend you are surrounded by a thousand hungry tigers. What would you do?”

I gave it some thought, imagining the scary scenario and feeling more and more tense. Would I pray? Probably not. Would I run? One doesn’t outrun tigers. Anxiety began to take hold as I saw in my mind’s eye the tigers closing in. I said to my young friend, “Wow, I don’t know what I would do. What would you do?”

And he replied, “I’d stop pretending.”

That got me to thinking. Could we stop pretending even if we wanted to? Could we stop pretending that the other person is to blame for a torn relationship; or that we could do a better job of leading the world instead of the people who are actually supposed to be doing that? Could we stop pretending that our life is a bed of roses when in fact it is a bush of thorns?

And what if we stopped pretending that God doesn’t exist; that the world invented itself and everything in it, including us?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be surrounded by those hungry tigers…guilt, jealousy, unbelief, narcissism, egoism, cynicism.

Maybe it’s time to face those hungry tigers and stop pretending.