Safe Room: Makeup on the Soul

“Safe?" said Mr. Beaver."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.” - CS Lewis

Various comedy shows and sitcoms have made fun of the wife that lies at home in bed with curlers in her hair, a white facial mask slathered over her face, and cucumbers over her eyes. Of course, she would never be seen outside of the house wearing that. While most women (including my wife) don't wear curlers and cucumbers (not that I've ever seen, at least), I know that my wife doesn't wear makeup around the house: she doesn't use cover-up to hide a blemish on her skin; she doesn't use foundation to smooth over wrinkles; and she doesn't feel the need to highlight her features and enhance her looks. She is comfortable being who she is around me. I'm safe.

Both my wife and I wear emotional "make-up" outside of our home (and sometimes even inside it). What I mean is, I often hide what's really going on inside me: I cover up that I'm feeling sad with a joke; I try and disguise the fact that I'm upset with a nice smile; and I drown out my disappointments in a busy life. However, on Easter Thursday, I was given a great gift: I was part of a grief session with ten other people. We all went around the room and shared what was really going on inside of us. I was able to share what was going on inside of me: all the junk that I've carried over the years, all the hurt and pain that built up. What allowed all this to come out was the steps taken to make sure that the room was a safe room to share all of this in: everything was kept confidential; only one speaker at a time; and no one was to give advice or any comments on what they heard. Simply let the person speak.

Unlike that room, we believe that life is not safe: we cannot share what is really going on inside of us because outside of a select few people, we believe that rejection is the norm; we believe that if most people knew who we really were on the inside, they wouldn't like us; and we believe that nobody wants to share in our pain and shame. We all carry within us pits of hurt and resentment, cess-pools of shame and guilt, areas in our lives that we want to forget about. Sometimes the person in our life that is the least safe is us.

And so, what we do is we build up defences: we wall off the areas that hurt us; we camouflage the shame; we misdirect and cover over; we become the class clown; we become the social butterfly, the geek, the self-righteous saint. Anything that will make it so that we don't have to be ourselves.

The Bible is full of people that are trying to hide and to run away from themselves. The Bible is full of people who are trying in vain to put makeup on their souls. The first instance is with Adam and Eve: they listen to the serpent's lies and eat the fruit. And now, they are in a place of tension: they have sinned. They are no longer who they want to be. Imagine the guilt - the red-coloured shame - they felt when they heard God's footsteps in the garden. Adam's response has been repeated so many times throughout the story of humanity: "I was naked, so I hid." It's all there: the central fear, the belief that who he now is is unacceptable and the attempt at covering it over - at hiding, at not being found out. Sewing the fig leaves together was an attempt at hiding more than their physical nakedness.

How often do we repeat this pattern: we go to the areas of shame in our lives - the areas that we swore to ourselves we wouldn't touch: the gossiping, the lust and lechery, the anger and the self-pity that we hate about ourselves. And then God comes. And we run away and hide. We try cover up with fig leaves - to pour makeup on our souls - because we think that without it we can't be loved. That if God really knew..., that God really does know....

Yes, God really does know. But, God is safe. I love the CS Lewis quote I put at the top - it talks about a God who is wild, untamed, fearless - anything but "safe". It also talks about a God who is good. The safe that CS Lewis is talking about though, is not the same safe that I am talking about. In fact, because God is not the safe that CS Lewis is talking about, God can be the safe that I am talking about. In other words, CS Lewis is talking about a God who doesn't fit society's expectations, about a God who is not standard, about a God who doesn't have an image to maintain. And it is because God does not care about our own petty rules of what is acceptable - about what sins are really sinful and which ones are not - that God can be safe in the sense of a God who will love you despite of who you are. It is because God doesn't have an image to maintain that He can allow you to not maintain yours either. God doesn't wear makeup. You don't need to either.

In Jesus, God built a safe room. Romans 8 starts out with: Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. In other words, if we are in Jesus, we are in a safe place. Have you ever played lava-tag when you were a kid? You pretend that the floor is lava, and that the couches and furniture are safe - you would hop from couch to coffee table to sofa chair and back (until mom stopped you) avoiding the floor at all costs. In our world, life is the lava. Life is where we get the rejection, where people call us losers or turn their backs on us, where pain, shame and guilt all happen. Jesus Christ is the couch. He is safe. God is good.

The greatest thing about God being safe in my mind is that He allows us to be ourselves. So often I have tried to be what I thought was the 'right' person to be: the good little boy growing up; the high-achieving academic in my undergrad; the perfect Christian husband / father / deacon etc.... All this to hide from others and myself who I thought I really was. God sees past all of that. God sees past who I try to be, and past who I think I am, and past how others see me, all the way to who He created me to be. God knows who I really am - not the facade, nor the fear and the shame and the burdens that I carry. He knows who I am without all of that...stuff weighing me down. And the glorious thing is, God reveals that in me when I enter His safe room.

I think that this search for finding someone who really knows who I am and is okay with that is what the story of Jacob is all about. From the start, he was always second fiddle - his big brother Esau took up all the stage room in the family, crowding out Jacob to the edges: Esau was the better hunter; Esau was the eldest; and Esau was his father's favourite. Jacob was already playing the shifting game, the deceiving and hiding game at an early age. He pretended to be someone he wasn't because he believed that who he was wasn't good enough. And then came the culmination of all those lies, all that masquerading: he had to run away. Not only was who he was not good enough - who he pretended to be wasn't good enough either. He now carried a heavy burden. Can you imagine how uneasy he must have been when he arrived at Laban's, and Laban questioned him about his family? How was Rebekah doing? How was his father, Issac doing? How about his brother, Esau? There was no way Jacob would tell the truth - it was too dangerous - Laban was not a safe place. He ended up running away from Laban just like he had run away from Esau. And both were catching up to him. Where did all of Jacob's running lead him to? Right into the hands of God - literally. It might seem odd to think of a wrestling match as a safe place. Yet, it is. That is why I like the quote at the top so much: God is not a safe place because He is calm and tranquil and we know what to expect from Him. Rather, it is the opposite: God is a safe place because He is free to be good. He is free to be fully good, to be extravagantly good, to be scandalously good. He is free to accept us as we are and remind us of who we were created to be. Up until that point, Jacob had forgotten who he was. He had never really known. God always knew. And that night, in that wrestling match with a fierce but safe God, Jacob found out. Jacob fount out that he was Israel.