Confession: I do not need to hide behind a mask, because my identity is found in my relationship with Christ.
Challenge: ” I will resist the temptation to hide behind masks and instead embrace who I am by learning to understand who God made me to be through His word.”
This week’s challenge is all about identifying masks in our lives, tearing them off, and living exactly as we are. I have struggled considerably trying to find how this applies since there seems to be so much overlap with the last weeks with living unfiltered, with recognizing you are living the life you are supposed to live no matter how dreary it is. A mask as defined by Merriam Webster is to conceal (something) from view. These can be traits, but for me, it is facts of who I am. I am a highly passionate person, which is simultaneously a blessing and a curse because I exhaust myself. I go with everything at 110%, I love to learn, and I am super enthusiastic about life and truly living it. But it is also frustrating because I have rarely met anyone who is almost always operating in this capacity. Another frustration of mine is coming to terms with how I fit amongst my peers despite my upbringing. Don’t get me wrong, I love every aspect of how I was raised; homeschooled, social media-free, and family-centered. However, it is hard when I never seem to fit anywhere, I feel the most at ease and the most myself when I am at home and hanging out with my two best friends: my brothers. My family truly and 100% understands me like no one else in my life has before. This is, of course, where I’d remind myself that God knows me like that- even if it’s hard to believe that most days. My education was delightfully unconventional; with things like learning how to renovate houses, international travel, career exploration, dance, and photography- anything I wanted to learn was open to me. I grew up thinking social media was just a thing for adults to keep and record memories, like mom’s Facebook account. When I was about 14 years old, I started to get comments like ” How do you survive?”, “Good for you, but I could never”; memes flew right over my head, pop culture was completely foreign to me, and slang was and is forever lost on me. I have never wanted social media, it makes something easier like international communication but I cannot forget the struggle I see in my peers every day. Struggling to believe their worth, feeding so much into a fleeting confirmation, even amongst Christian friends the constant struggle of deleting and redownloading. Having such a family focus is also, not typical for most of my peers; I often get teased, lovingly so, for going home on breaks. To tell the truth, it feels like wearing a mask without them by my side, like I am pretending to be someone I am not.
The image above is of a rusty old lock tightly chained to a faded wooden door, the color just drained from its appearance. Sometimes I think that is my mask, I dim down my light to fit in to be more “normal”. I might change from a confident facade with one friend to a more timid one, or a complaining one, or a bubbly, happy one. I feel rather lost sometimes trying to carve out how I ought to be, with my present and future tugging me one way and my past, my upbringing pulling me in the opposite direction. Perhaps, this lost feeling is a part of growing up and finding my place in the world. I’m not sure. But I do know that I keep all of these, how I was raised, how I am now, what I could be clenched tight.
This week I want to try something different- I am going to try to just be me, no masks to adapt to others, no hiding, concealing, or dimming. And hey! You got this too- I know this post was rather disheartening and I know it’s hard. It’s exhausting to hold up all those walls, to juggle all those masks, but it’s beyond exhausting to pull down something so deep, so ingrained. So, how am I going to do this? I am going to pick a scripture each day denoting something about my identity as given by Christ and I am going to start my day like that. Anytime that I begin to feel the masks creep back on I will remond myslef of what that scripture says. So, as I close, just rest in this:
Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.- Luke 12:7