Please find a way to share with your wife and show her the inside of your heart! And let her know you appreciate it when she shares hers.

There’s another side to the coin — that some of us would like to show others our hearts. We would be willing to reveal our weaknesses, fears, and faults. (And our joys and hopes and genuinely unselfish accomplishments. But others are so frozen into their masks that they aren’t comfortable with us showing who we are. It “just isn’t done in today’s society”, you know! Where do we find people who will accept us as ourselves? And who will let us accept them as themselves even if we happen to see some things behind the masks?

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I’m not sure this is completely thought out Tony. I think we may hide who we are mainly because we do not want anyone else to know or even suspect anything might be wrong with us – especially things we ourselves suspect or know to be wrong with us. Sadly, this is pride and ego all mixed up in our little brains, a brain that fears even our own small shadow.

Otherwise, if we didn’t care what others thought about us or we thought ourselves to be A-OK, we usually would have nothing to hide under the mask.

But, people can also be private and they will not tell you anything about themselves even though there is nothing to hide. It is just none of your business or they do not want to be ‘vulnerable.’

My mother always believed that to have a good friend and a good relationship, you both have to be vulnerable to each other, knowing you could discuss anything but it stayed private between the two of you when necessary.

She always said if need a good friend pick one you would like to have and tell them the worst thing about yourself. If they tell you the worst thing about themselves then you have made a good friend if you never hear about it again from anyone else. A pretty tall order most always she claimed – but worth it. Good friends are hard to find and people have so few of them for all kinds of wrong reasons.

The thinner the mask, the happier the face is underneath.

I saw the movie ‘Harvey’ again last night with James Stewart and I am reminded of the original ‘Elwood’ who never met a person he didn’t like or call a friend and they felt the same about him.

Elwood was the nicest guy around and never hid anything from anyone including the fact that he had a 6′3″ imaginary Rabbit friend named Harvey. But, normal people thought Elwood was crazy but it turned out the ‘normal people’ were way more crazy than Elwood or his friend Harvey.

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I suppose we are still living with this shame and guilt today and wonder if it may even be magnified; at least, in our own eyes. We try to posture in various ways, cover our blemishes with clothing and make-up, and even spend ourselves into unrecoverable debt to give the impression of being truly good and worthy people. But, nothing of this world ever works.

I think C.S. Lewis describes it best when he states that God will expose you of your sin and take it away, but it will be a very painful process. He won’t necessary wash you on the outside, but will penetrate to your soul and clean you from the inside out. When that occurs, then we can set our masks aside and show people who we are, who we are meant to be. Because at that point, Christ stands in our place.

As a final note, thank God for wives who know us better than we know ourselves and still love us anyway.

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