October 2

“God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.” – Shakespeare  

I love to read, and anyone who knows me has seen the myriad number of books that I have on my shelves, much less the number of them boxed away in storage. Books are an integral part of my life and allow me to stretch the bonds of my imagination. They have a way of transporting me to another time and place where I feel like I really live inside the story. Sometimes the books I read are not necessarily a story about someone else, but perhaps about ME. I joined an online book club group and we have started with a book called “TrueFaced”. To be completely honest, I can’t get out of the first chapter. It’s not that the book is boring, or uninteresting, but rather digesting the words on the page quite literally boggle my mind. The tag line for the book is “Trust God and others with who you really are.” Who of us really and truly share with others the “real” person inside of us? I would beg to consider that very few of us do. The man or woman in the mirror that we look at every day, is quite different from the mask of ourselves that we wear to everyone else. It’s as if life is a masquerade and our ability or status is measured by the depths of our concealment.

How many times have you been asked, “how are you” and replied with the words, “I’m fine”, “Good”, “things are going ok”, etc. Page 20 describes this as “The Land of ‘Doing Just fine’”. Can you relate to that? I know I can! DAILY. Sometimes its because we truly are doing just fine, but most times it is the easier answer. Because after all, the person asking the question is also wearing a mask and they really don’t want to know the truth. Perhaps that is the reason why it is so difficult to live outside the masquerade. Truth is scary, unknown and requires a vulnerability that most of us, quite honestly, are not ready or desire to experience.

 

As I think through the ramifications of the mask that we wear, it reminds me of a part in one of the Chronicles of Narnia books. In “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, Eustace outwardly portrays the innards of his heart. He was a greedy little boy, who literally hated everyone, and when he found a dragon’s stash of gold immediately began to hoard some of it for himself.  What he didn’t realize was that the outward manifestation of his heart turned HIM into a dragon! It wasn’t until after he had learned and faced certain things about himself that the realization of truth set him free. Quite honestly, it wasn’t an easy process for him and despite his trying to rid himself of the dragons skin, it required help from some ONE else.