Well, the time has finally come. Tomorrow, I head to Atlanta for Launch before getting on a plane to India. So, this will be my last blog post from here in the States.
As you may have noticed, this is also the first blog I’ve posted in nearly a month. After spitting them out at an average of over one per week, I suddenly took a month long hiatus from writing. And I think you deserve to know why.
Honestly, I didn’t even know why myself until a few days ago. I just thought that I didn’t have any new ideas worth sharing; chalked it up to the idea that sometimes we just have creative droughts. And, that was a sufficient enough reason for me to not be writing.
But, I realized it was actually something deeper—something that had to do more with the heart than with the mind.
I’m currently reading a book by Donald Miller called Scary Close. In it, Miller talks about the way we often put on a mask in front of the rest of the world to showcase the person that we want people to think that we really are. We hide our true selves behind a facade. We essentially become actors.
Speaking into this idea, he says, “But the reality is all writing is a subtle form of manipulation, not always malicious, but usually designed to do two things: (1) communicate an idea and (2) make the writer sound intelligent.”
You see, I never realized it, but I was doing this.
I was putting on a mask and this mask was suffocating me.
So far, my blog posts have been fairly well received and a couple have garnered a bit of attention. More attention than I had expected and certainly more than I had ever had. See, I had never published anything I had ever written before. So, when the first things I decided to put out there got a decent reception, it ended up going to my head.
When I say it ended up going to my head I don’t mean that I thought I was going to be the next Hemingway or Faulkner or whoever. What I mean is that I subconsciously began trying to create a new version of myself. A version of myself where I could communicate the idea but also sound intelligent, like Donald Miller said.
The issue with this version of myself is that I was putting an enormous amount of pressure and stress on myself to keep up the act. I virtually stopped writing because I was paralyzed by the fear that my next idea wouldn’t be as gripping as the last one was. And, if I wasn’t writing, I certainly wasn’t publishing; if I couldn’t post something that I was confident would get a lot of attention, then it wasn’t worth putting out there.
Because—in my mind—if it didn’t get a lot of attention, then that meant that my mask was cracking. It meant that the readers must be able to see that I’m actually not as smart or as clever or as creative or even as spiritual as I want to appear; that people would see that I actually have flaws.
When I read that sentence in Scary Close, it opened my eyes up to the reality of how I had been living: that mask that I had decided to put on was just covering up shame. Shame that somehow I wasn’t creative or that my ideas weren’t worth sharing.
I wonder how many of us are quietly being suffocated by the masks that we have molded for ourselves. How often are we checking to make sure that we are keeping up the version of ourselves that we want the world to see because we are ashamed of the person we are underneath? Do we hide behind intelligence or humor or beauty or athleticism because we are scared to death that people wouldn’t love us if they were to see who we really were beneath all of that? Because we are afraid that people would reject us if they were able to see that we actually had flaws?
After I finally admitted to myself that I was using a mask to cover up my shame, Jesus stepped in and did what He’s best at: He reminded me of who He is. He’s the healer of our deepest scars. He’s the father of our broken hearts. He is mercy. He is power.
He is freedom.
Freedom from the shackles of sin; freedom from the shackles of shame.
Being reminded of who Jesus is reminded me of who we are in Him. That we who are in Christ are no longer bound by this shame. In fact, in Isaiah 54:4 we are commanded to “fear not, for [we] will not be ashamed…for [we] will forget the shame of our youth.”
And this opened my eyes to the fact that–hidden beneath that unwarranted and unwelcome shame–is my true self. The self that was “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). The self who is creative because we are all made in the image of the true Creator. The self whose ideas matter because we all matter down to every single hair on our heads (Luke 12:7). The self who has flaws and weaknesses but who can rest in the fact that Christ’s power is made perfect in these weaknesses (2 Cor. 12:9).
This radically changed the way I view myself as a writer.
Remembering that in Christ I have the freedom to be fully me, I will now write without the pressure of keeping on this mask that I so misguidedly created. I will write about who I truly am rather than who I want people to think that I am.
So, I ask, what if we all were to shake off the heavy chains of sin and shame? What if we all just lived in the peace of knowing that who we are—flaws and all—is exactly who we were created to be?
What if we all took off our masks?
