The Satmar Rov zy"a used to say that the gemora that says a talmid chacham is chayav misa if his jacket is dirty nowadays applies to all frumme yidden, since the world looks to us as rabbis, and we all basically look pretty similar - it is mamesh a taiva to have people on the street think 'oh, he's so different, a rabbi, a scholar, etc..' I've had the same yatzer hora in the past, and it can be very dangerous. There's not too much that separates responding to the question on judaism asked by an old female friend(or stranger) to aveiros and taivos - I remember before I stopped going on chat rooms, I would sometimes play 'rabbi' and go on teenage chat rooms, convincing myself that I could do kiruv - even when I did keep myself talking clean and 'intellectual', I always ended up looking at pictures of whichever girl I was talking to - at one point I even became 'involved' with a girl online who lived in alaska right before rosh hashana! he's sneaky, very, very sneaky.
There's a reason why we don't do kiruv with goyim. the gain is not worth the loss.
I went to a kiruv school back in high school(where I became frum, baruch hashem), and ocasionally I'll see some of my old friends - some are very frum, even bnei torah; I sometimes run into the ones who aren't frum(brooklyn isn't that big of a place) or aren't quite yet completely shomer torah umitzvos - they are very impressed(since now I have a beard and payos, hat, jacket etc..) - it's a good feeling when that happens, but I've seen that at least in my own experiences, it's a shtikel gaiva/kovod seeking when I fantasize about it - if it happens, good, it's a kiddush hashem(except one time when at a later graduation i was davening for the amud and forgot how to say kedushah for a second; I was corrected by a kid in the high school) - I used to think about running into my old junior high school friends who weren't even jewish as well - how amazed they'd be! it's a boost to hear so many compliments, but it's so much more important to live above chanifa and the opinions of tohers - it's like rav dessler say; a lot of times gaiva is just really insecurity - the pursuit of the approval of others is not necessarily because of over-inflated ego in the classic sense, but rather, the ego is inflated because we lack self-esteem, so we need to fill it with something - this is why the case in mesilas yeshorim of the loud boisterous baal gaiva who gets upset when you come within a hairsbreadth of a pegiah in his self-made kovod is not a simple baal gayva, rather he lacks self-respect and requires constant approval, lest he feel inferior.
(I am not chas veshalom calling anyone a baal gayva, just explaining how it is in my experiences)
P.S. sorry if I appear to pop in only occasionally; I'm in yeshiva and the only time I have access to a computer is when I come home for shabbos(afterwards, of course)
