God's Man | Masks | The Ones We Wear...
I used to teach one of the new member classes at Living Hope Church. The class has had different names of the 6 years that I have been there but the content has remained the same, understanding your personality and how it effects you. When I took this class as a new member the material was not foreign to me. It was material that our former church, Houston Christian Fellowship, used in their leadership training course. I had also trained organizations on this material and the personality test that was its basis. The test is called D.I.S.C. and it identified, to a certain degree, personality traits you held.
One of the things that we talked about as part of the class are the masks that we put on to show the world what we want them to see. Wearing masks are an important part of our culture. We are not an open society like we portray to the world. As a country we wear a mask of solidarity towards the world but underneath it we are a mixed bag of factions. This bubbles up out of the fact that as individuals we do not want others to know who we really are. We hide behind shiny veneers of cute Facebook pictures and witty Tweets. We cram Tumblr, Blogger, and Wordpress with our thoughts about a myriad of things and we use linkedin to show how professional we can be. However underneath it all we are bundles of emotions that we can sometimes control.
As I work through my salvation with fear and trembling and talk to others who are doing the same here are 2 masks that we can often wear.
The Angry Mask: This is the mask that we use often as a defense mechanism to keep others at bay. We can do this for a lot of reasons but in my experience it is because we don't want to get hurt. We are scared that others will hurt us so we lash out at them first.
This mask steals the joy of meeting new people and the growth that comes from working through difficult situations. Put the Angry Mask away.
The Religious Mask: This is one of the most dangerous masks that I run into. It is also a mask that I wore for much of my youth. This is the mask that allows us to look good on Sunday but living like hell Monday through Saturday. I call this one dangerous because it can present a false image of what the church is.
This mask steals the day to day work of community. We can't labor together for the kingdom if we don't know what each other's weaknesses are. If you have no upper body strength I don't want you spotting me in the gym.
I wanted this post to be short so I am going to cut this off here. But as we go through the rest of this week I am going to talk about how to break out of these masks and introduce some other ones.
Whatever you do with this post make sure you do it in the comments section below.
Talk to you tomorrow,
- God's Man
One of the things that we talked about as part of the class are the masks that we put on to show the world what we want them to see. Wearing masks are an important part of our culture. We are not an open society like we portray to the world. As a country we wear a mask of solidarity towards the world but underneath it we are a mixed bag of factions. This bubbles up out of the fact that as individuals we do not want others to know who we really are. We hide behind shiny veneers of cute Facebook pictures and witty Tweets. We cram Tumblr, Blogger, and Wordpress with our thoughts about a myriad of things and we use linkedin to show how professional we can be. However underneath it all we are bundles of emotions that we can sometimes control.
As I work through my salvation with fear and trembling and talk to others who are doing the same here are 2 masks that we can often wear.
This mask steals the joy of meeting new people and the growth that comes from working through difficult situations. Put the Angry Mask away.
The Religious Mask: This is one of the most dangerous masks that I run into. It is also a mask that I wore for much of my youth. This is the mask that allows us to look good on Sunday but living like hell Monday through Saturday. I call this one dangerous because it can present a false image of what the church is. I wanted this post to be short so I am going to cut this off here. But as we go through the rest of this week I am going to talk about how to break out of these masks and introduce some other ones.
Whatever you do with this post make sure you do it in the comments section below.
Talk to you tomorrow,
- God's Man
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