We All Like Playing Dress Up, Don't We?
“O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar…Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. you hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.” Psalm 139:1-2; 4-5
My wife loves to dress up in costumes. When I first met her in college I soon found out that she had an entire chest of dress up clothes that she would randomly wear out in public. To be honest, this didn’t stop with college. Now she gets extremely excited about any opportunity to throw on a costume (or force me into one). Naturally, Trick-or-Treating is a pretty big deal in my house. My wife loves to get our family to go as a theme. So, a couple of years ago we went as the entire crew from Scooby-Doo! Can you guess who I got to be? That’s right, I was Scooby. Somehow my wife found a giant Scooby costume, and it just happened to fit me perfectly.
But something interesting happened as I walked through our neighborhood dressed in this ridiculous giant dog costume; I started to like it. What I specifically liked about it was this: nobody knew who I was! It felt sort of good to hide behind ample amounts of brown fur and a dog collar!
As silly as that might sound, I’d be willing to bet that we all attempt to hide behind something. Most of us have some sort of costume that we “wear” so that people will not see the real us. Basically what we are trying to do is to pretend that we are better than we really are, right?
We cover up the things that we don’t want other people to see, and we promote the things about ourselves that we want to stand out. If we’re really honest, we might even admit that the clothes we picked out to wear today are in some small way an attempt to get people to think a certain way about us.
Now you could drive yourself crazy analyzing every little thing you do and asking yourself if you are being genuine or not, but that’s not my point. My point is that you have already found ways to keep people from seeing the real you and the question is, why? Some of us hide behind our clothes, others behind our achievements or performance, and maybe some of us hide behind our humor (it’s pretty easy for me to hide behind sarcasm…ugh).
It’s pretty scary to let people see the real us, isn’t us? It’s scary because what we think deep down inside is that if people really saw me then they wouldn’t want to be around me.
Here’s what I want you to think about today: God sees every single, little, itty-bitty, tiny thing about you. The Bible says he knows your thoughts before they are even formed in your mind. He knows your words before they even come out of your mouth. You cannot hide from God.
And here’s the thing, despite seeing all of the parts of you that you want to hide, he nonetheless looks at you and says, “I love you and forgive you!” Now, if God accepts us through his son, Jesus, then why should we be so nervous or scared about what others think of us?