When We Feel Like Faking It



Studying the new study for the men's group I lead, I saw this and wanted to share with you. I like this so much I ordered the book from Christianbooks.com. It makes you think; at least it made me think on how I act around others.


From “TrueFaced: Truth God and Others with Who You Really Are”

The ancient Greeks loved their theater. It was the Broadway of the Appian Way. But their immense outdoor amphitheaters had some built-in problems. People in the back row could not see the actors’ faces, let alone their expressions. So some director came up with the idea of having the actors deliver their lines behind giant masks.
All the actors held a pole that carried an enormous papier-mâché mask that portrayed their predominant nature – good or evil. The mask was always a caricature – an overdone, generalized, or idealized portrayal. If the playwright wanted to show that a character had changed during the play, that actor’s mask was traded for another. But the actors never revealed their true faces. Throughout the play, they all acted out their roles behind a façade. These performers were not called actors, but hypocrites, literally, “one who wears a mask.” A hypocrite was one who continually wore masks and whose face the audience never saw.
A great mechanism for ancient Greek theater. A tragic mechanism for people who hunger to be known and loved in the light of day.
We are all performers, and like the actors in ancient Greece, we don’t show our true faces. Because of sin, we’ve lost confidence that we will always please our audience, so we feel compelled to hide and put on a mask.
We have dozens of masks in our wardrobes, including:

The "happy: mask
The "I'm better than most" mask
The "I'm very together" mask
The "I don't care" mask
The "I'm very important" mask
The "I'm the expert" mask