Hey all.
I'm not in the mood for chit chat.....so I'll just jump into what I've been thinking today. Bear with me, this is long, but hopefully worth it!
Have you ever played make-believe?? Have you ever put on a front?? Have you ever been in a play? Have you ever wanted to be someone else? For the most part, pretending is a thing for children....and the young at heart.....Most adults don't run around playing cowboys and indians, they have a different kind of make believe. They pretend to be someone they're not. They buy more then they can afford to seem richer, they do more then they have time for so that they seem busy or popular....these are the negative aspects that come to mind when I think about "pretending" or "putting on a face"....
However, pretending, or imitating if you will, is not always something to avoid. I was reading
Mere Christianity today, and C.S. Lewis said something that I found very interesting.
"May I once again start by putting two pictures, or two stories rather,
into your minds? One is the story you have all read called Beauty and the
Beast. The girl, you remember, had to marry a monster for some reason. And
she did. She kissed it as if it were a man. And then, much to her relief, it
really turned into a man and all went well. The other story is about someone
who had to wear a mask; a mask which made him look much nicer than he really
was. He had to wear it for year. And when he took it off he found his own
face had grown to fit it. He was now really beautiful. What had begun as
disguise had become a reality. I think both these stories may (in a fanciful
way, of course) help to illustrate what I have to say in this chapter."
"....Lord's Prayer. Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of
a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like,
you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment you realise what the
words mean, you realise that you are not a son of God. You are not being
like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the
Father: you are a bundle of self-centred fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies,
and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up
as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that He has
ordered us to do it."
"there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing.
When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the
best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave
as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes,
as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.
Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as
if you had it already."
" You see what is happening. The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is
man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side
and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a
reality. This is not merely a fancy way of saying that your conscience is
telling you what to do. If you simply ask your conscience, you get one
result: if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a
different one. There are lots of things which your conscience might not call
definitely wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you will see at
once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ.
For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying
to catch the good infection from a Person. It is more like painting a
portrait than like obeying a set of rules. And the odd thing is that while
in one way it is much harder than keeping rules, in another way it is far
easier."
So, I read that....and I began to think about what the Bible has to say on the subject. Paul is a BIG advocate of "pretending"....he tells us in several of his letters to "imitate me as I imitate Christ" or "you became imitators of us and of the Lord" and "you became imitators of the churches of Jesus Christ...."
Do you see why this is good? I think what Paul and Lewis are trying to say is that we should not try to retain ourselves while follow a set of rules. I should not be trying to become "the sanctified version of myself" but rather "a completely new person that is exactly like Christ." I need to think like, act like, react like and imitate Jesus. It takes Christianity a step further then just rules, it's a whole transformation of me as a person. It's about changing my mindset and my core being as much as it is about the list of "do nots".....
