TrueFaced

NAVPRESS

Chapter One

Away and mock the time with fairest show; False face must hide what the false heart doth know. -Shakespeare, Macbeth

Ever since we were children we have had dreams and hopes of destiny. Some of these dreams are our own, but others came from the very heart of God-and God's dreams never go off the radar screen. Even time, failure, or heartbreak can't make us forget them entirely. Still, most of us have tried to stuff them into the attic. We have been rudely awakened out of too many of them, too many times, and each time we lost more and more of the dream. Yet, even if we've forgotten the fiber of those dreams, God has not.

God dreams that you would discover your destiny and walk into the reasons he placed you on this earth. God has a ticket of destiny with your name written on it-no matter how old, how broken, how tired, or how frightened you are. No matter how many times you may have failed, God dearly longs for the day when he gets to hand you that ticket, smile, and whisper into your ear, "You have no idea how long I've waited to hand this to you. Have a blast! I've already seen what you get to do. It's better than you could have dreamed. Now hurry up and get on that train. A whole lot of folk are waiting for you to walk into your destiny and into their lives."

Wow! How stunningly incredible! Yet many of us read these words of hope and think, Can you possibly have any idea how much I want to believe that? But if this is true, if these words are really true, then someone tell me-what has happened to my life! I have had those dreams. I've experienced them in the core of my soul. I believe God has such dreams for me. But every attempt to step into these dreams has been a repeated scene of shooting myself in the foot. The circumstances change, but the shooting and my foot are in each scene. After each repeated failure, I have less confidence anything will ever change. I have these longings, these dreams, that I've always thought were from God, aching to be released. But far more often I just hurt, confuse, and frustrate the very people and environments I long to bless. It's as if nobody but me can see the dream, and there are insurmountable obstacles at every turn. And though I blame others, I'm pretty sure most of the obstacles have to do with me. I'm not even sure what I'm doing wrong to thwart each effort. I just do. I'm so preoccupied with my own issues that I can't even make sense of this moment, let alone the dream. It feels like I will never be fit, prepared, or matured to match the beauty and grandeur of what I've seen in the distance. The dreams are becoming cruel mirages, shimmering pools of once naive hope, now melted. I fear I am becoming jaded to such dreaming and am settling into a gray existence of sleepy living in a land where it is always desert with no oasis.

So, here's the not-so-small print that maybe you never read at the start of your journey: God's dreams for you are ultimately not really about you. Oh, don't misunderstand. They'll bring you some of the best days of your life; you will be fulfilled beyond any imaginable expectations. But God's dreams take form only when they are about others, for the benefit of others. Loving them. Guiding them. Serving them. Influencing them. Filling their heads with dreams and hope. There are no other types of God dreams. Nothing less or else will compel, attract, or seem worthy of this God heart within you. Everything else will always, ultimately, taste chalky and dry. God's destiny for you will never be so trivial as building a kingdom for you to enhance your acclaim. Such is a kingdom of dust and lint. The dream he has prepared custom for you is explosively beautiful and alive. It's about his glorious kingdom-a plan involving you from before there was time! This stunning dream always involves others. Others being freed, healed, convinced of who they really are, convinced that they can fly, convinced his dreams in them can come true. This unbending intention of God has been at once the source of your best dreaming and your continuous foot shooting.

Think about it-God's dreams for us reflect his heart. If we are not maturing in sync with his heart, how would we distinguish others-centered dreams from self-centered dreams? Many of us remain so wounded and preoccupied with our own stuff that we concoct our own tepid, cheap dreams and call them God's. After a while we wouldn't recognize God's dream for us if it came up and shouted, "Howdy, I'm your dream!"

God wants to reveal himself to us in authenticity. Because one of God's dreams is that we would influence others far more out of who we are than out of what we do. So, above all else, your destiny requires that you be a maturing person. The Father wants us to mature into the "likeness of his Son," because he can't release us into his dreams for us unless we are maturing.

We wrote TrueFaced for those who pant for a life worth living. We wrote TrueFaced for those who have tasted of their destiny, but have lost its flavor in brokenhearted disappointment. We wrote TrueFaced for those suffocating under hope-stifling masks. We wrote TrueFaced for those longing to see their God with eyes no longer filtered with fear, self-disgust, and desperate proving.

Remember the first time you came face-to-face with the self-sufficient life and came to despise it? Remember humbly admitting to God who you really were? Right about then you met Jesus-and experienced this kind of hope in a way you had never before imagined.

God couldn't help us until we trusted him with who we really were. That was perhaps our first taste of a TrueFaced life. It was stunning. Incredible. It painted our world in colors we hardly knew existed. But, something happened to many of us in the intervening years. We lost confidence that his delight of us and new life in us would be a strong enough impetus for a growth that would glorify God and fix our junk. So, we gradually bought the slick sales pitch that told us we would need to find something more, something others seemed to have that we could never quite get our hands around. Something magical and mystical that we would receive if we tried hard enough and proved good enough, often enough. And so we began learning to prop things up. We went back to trying to impress God and others-back to posturing, positioning, manipulating, trying to appear better than who we were. Our two-faced life has severely stunted our growth. And broken our hearts. And left us gasping. Although we may have accumulated titles, status, and accomplishments, we personally remain wounded and immature-long on "success," but short on dreams. We admire people who live the TrueFaced life, but our loss of hope has forced us into desperately trying to discover safety from behind our masks. In a very real sense, we are all performers. Because of sin we've lost confidence that we will always please our audience, and so we put on a mask. As an unintended result, no one, not even the people we love, ever get to see our true face.

John fashioned an elaborate mask shortly after he graduated from Arizona State University in 1975. He hadn't given much thought about his future; he had just assumed it would come knocking at his door.

As May neared, his classmates started telling him about their soon-to-be-launched careers in companies such as IBM, Xerox, and Fidelity Mutual. His friends had secured real, actual careers-complete with salaries and benefits! After bragging about their bright futures, his classmates would inevitably ask, "So, how about you, John? What field are you going into?"

"Well... I'm... uh... keeping my options open. I've got a lot of brands in the fire. I don't want to bite at the first thing to come along."

In truth, John had nothing in the fire, but admitting that felt way too risky. So he made two significant decisions. First, without telling anyone, he moved to Isla Vista, a small beach town near Santa Barbara, California-a town where no one knew him and where those who did couldn't find him.

Second, he wrote to everyone he knew, and told them, "Hey, I found a gig in Isla Vista. I can't believe it! I'm the featured weekend comedy act at a nightclub named Borsody's. I've worked up a bunch of new bits, local kinds of stuff. Just a couple of Saturdays ago a talent guy asked the manager if he could use me a couple nights in L.A.! Well, stay in touch. I'll write more later. I've gotta work on tonight's show."

Actually, Isla Vista did have a nightclub named Borsody's. John just made up a few of the surrounding details.

With that letter, John fashioned a mask that he thought would protect him from his friends' pity. The trouble is, once we put on a mask, we have a hard time taking it off. John kept that particular mask on for four and a half years! It had become his identity.

After a while the mask began to deceive even him. The lie rolled off of his tongue so easily that he began to believe it was part of his history-that he actually had been a comedian at Borsody's! When he describes that time in his life, John says, "I could see the smoke-filled room and the hurricane lamps at each table. I could see the light spilling onto a stage with a stool and a mike that sent my voice out into a dark sea of smiling faces. I could hear the audience's laughter and smell the beer. Now that's a mask!"

Unknown to him, John's mask was actually as thin as sketch paper. People could see right through it. Years later, he asked a few of his friends, "Did you believe me? Did you wonder if I actually was doing stand-up comedy?"

One of his best friends told him, "We never talked much about it. We just loved you. We figured that if it weren't true, it probably wouldn't help for us to blow your cover. No, I guess I never really thought you were doing stand-up."

Wow! John had told himself that he had on wonderful, hip clothes: "I thought my friends were proud of me. I thought they believed I was somebody significant and famous. What a waste of energy and soul. The papier-mâché mask I thought would protect me by covering up the truth didn't. In fact, it had the opposite effect-it caused me to be the object of my friends' pity. If only I had just waited tables."

Some of us reading this might be thinking, Whew! I'm glad I'm not like John. Imagine, lying to people about who you are! Making up stories and almost believing them yourself! That's messed up!

It's true. Pretending to be someone you are not is messed up... messed up like the president of the United States Olympic Committee Sandy Baldwin, who suddenly lost her position for lying on her résumé about her education. Or messed up like Philippine President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, who banked on macho charisma and pro-poor platforms while breaking the law "like clockwork." Estrada held millions in illicit funds through a network of hidden bank accounts. Or messed up like Alabama District Judge Jack Montgomery, who, under cover of the justice system, extorted bribes from defendants. Or like Tom Collen, whose résumé "errors" cost him his new job as Vanderbilt's women's basketball coach. Or like Martin Frankel, the financier who took control of seven U.S. insurance companies and embezzled more than two hundred million dollars before fleeing to Rome in a private jet. Or messed up like, um, well, like King Saul when he said, "I did obey God."

Adam and Eve's Legacy

Do you remember how mask-wearing got started? God comes in the cool of the day to be with Adam and Eve after the "apple incident." He calls out to a hiding Adam, "Where are you?"-knowing very well where Adam is. Adam responds, "I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself."

There they are, the opening steps to the dance of mask-wearing-I become afraid because something I did or was done to me made me feel naked. And this nakedness cried out to be covered. Nothing feels more frightening or lonely than nakedness. And not knowing how to allow myself to be covered, I hid myself. Every dance of mask-wearing follows such steps. This shame, this self-perception of embarrassment and being "dirty," prompted Adam and Eve to fashion masks from leaves in order to hide what was true about them.

That day all humanity learned how to look over our shoulders, how to glance furtively, how to say one thing and mean another, how to hide fear, deceit, and shame behind a thin smile. That day we learned how to give the appearance we are someone other than who we actually are. And we've developed it into an art form! (Thanks, Adam and Eve. Nice legacy.) But gradually, we lose all hope that we can change or be "fixed." So we cover up. We put on a mask and begin bluffing. Mask wearers usually fall into one of three groups: those living in the Land of "Doing Just Fine," those searching for the next "new" technique, or those wearing pedigreed masks.

The Land of "Doing Just Fine"

Those of us who live in the Land of "Doing Just Fine" are surrounded by nicely scrubbed folk who smile broadly and shake each others' hand firmly. Our conversations go something like this:

"Hi, Milo. How ya doin'?"

"Doin' fine, Mitch. Yourself?"

"Fine, Milo. Fine. Couldn't be finer. Fine day, eh?"

"Fine indeed, Milo. Oh, hi, Mildred. How ya doin'?" "Well, hello, Mitch. I'm doin' fine, considering the circumstances. Just fine. Fine day we're having."

"Yes, it is Mildred. Fine as fine can be. How's that husband of yours?"

"Well, Mitch, he's doin' fine too. Whole family's doin' just fine. Can't complain. Yep, I just spoke to Mrs. Sanderson and she told me that she was doing fine, but she had it on reliable information that several other unnamed families were not doing fine. She asked that I not share that publicly, but I tell you, only so you might pray more effectively."

"Well, that's fine with me, Mildred. At least we're fine... just fine."

The time has come for those of us who say we are "doin' just fine" to acknowledge the truth: We are not fine, not fine at all. We're hurting. We're lonely, confused, and frightened. We are convinced there is no real help for our issues and that the best thing we can do is to hide our true identities. It's time to admit what we're really thinking: You have no idea who I am. Nobody knows who I am. Nobody. Not even my spouse. I'm surrounded by friends and family, but they don't know me. Every time I enter a room, it's with a persona as big as I am.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from TrueFaced by Bill Thrall Bruce McNicol John Lynch Copyright © 2004 by Bill Thrall and Bruce McNicol. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---