Will you quell the fear inside and never be the same?
*
Lord, Your summons echoes true when you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go where your love and footsteps
show.
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you and you in me.
--John L. Bell and Graham A Maule, 1987
Mardi Gras is a couple of weeks in our rear view mirrors,
but I still come across strings of purple beads tucked between the cushions in
my sofa, or under the seat of my Honda. I know for a fact I’m still working the
Fat Tuesday pancakes off my hips (Shakira preached truth when she said “hips
don’t lie”). And if you follow the Mardi
Gras pageantry in New Orleans (or in Mobile, where Mardi Gras is even older),
or even the Krewe de Tigris fun
of a small-town Auburn Mardi Gras, you know that masks are a vital part of the
revelry.
Masks allow us to pretend, to be someone or something other
than who we are for a bit. They are pretense, misdirection, fantasy. Masks are
fun or spooky, glamorous or mysterious.
But friends. When masks become our daily uniform, when we
hide the reality of our lives--our truest joys and our deepest anguishes—from
the world, and from ourselves, then our masks will be our undoing. Jesus calls
us, by name, to repudiate fear’s power
over us, the power that keeps us tied to the sameness of those masks. Jesus
calls us, by name, to step out
from behind the masks that are smothering us, to step into the uncovered truth
of God’s love.
Out in the open, unmasked, there is moving, and living, and growing, in the company of
Christ.
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