A word about ,…masks.

I grew up in a neighborhood with tar and gravel streets. Once a year, men would come through our neighborhood with big machines, sweep up the old gravel, and lay down a fresh coat of tar. They never let us kids anywhere near them while they were working, of course. Hot tar and heavy trucks aren’t exactly playmates for a bunch of neighborhood kids. But once they finished and moved on, that’s when the real fun started for us. That fresh tar cooled into little puddles along the sidewalk edges, black and soft like taffy. If you were lucky, you could find a piece the size of a dinner plate, maybe, perfect for molding it into whatever you could imagine. Well, one early summer afternoon, I got especially creative. I shaped a piece of tar into a mask, covered the top of my face, holes cut out for my eyes. It didn’t even need a string. It just stuck there like it had been made for me. I ran inside to check the mirror in the house, and there he was, the Lone Ranger. I looked just like him. I threw on my cowboy shirt and I grabbed my hat and guns and I walked out into the envy of every kid on our block. Eventually, though, I got tired of pretending. About three o’clock, I guess it was, I came in for a rest. I set my tar mask carefully on the dresser in my room. Then I went into the living room and plopped down to wait for my folks to get home. And that’s when it started. My face began to blister. My dad spent most of his life in construction. He took one look at me on the couch and he said, burned. How’d you get burned? I told him I hadn’t been near any fire. I was just outside playing cowboys with my friends. He said, Tell me exactly what you did today. So I told him about the mask, about the tar I’d found in the street. Tar has creosote in it, son. He said, When you left that mask on your face, that creosote started to burn. Not much to do now but wait it out. It’s gonna burn for a while. Well, for the next ten days, every time I looked in the mirror, I saw the outline of that mask etched into my own skin that was now peeling and flaking. A reminder written on my face, you might say, of the pain that masks had caused. Almost everyone I know puts on a mask every now and then. I’ve caught myself doing it plenty of times, playing a role, pretending perhaps to be someone I wasn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever really fooled anybody, though, certainly not God. There’s not much difference between a mask made of tar and a mask made to hide my insecurity and who knows, perhaps even my effort at creating envy in other people. Underneath both kinds of masks is the same kind of hidden harm. God loves transparency, authenticity. Wearing a mask never works with God because God sees who we really are. I find great consolation in this truth. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That’s first John chapter one, verse nine.