Beneath This Leaden Face

I have heard that when Queen Elizabeth died her face was already buried beneath three inches of heavy white lead makeup. She began using it to cover the scars left behind by smallpox, but it turned out the stuff was toxic. After too many days the skin underneath the mask began to deteriorate and, all the while, the queen became known by her ghastly countenance. To remove the leaden stuff would have rendered her unrecognizable to her world. Her mask became her face.

So it is with my person, but with a startling difference. As God scrapes off the layers of accumulated 'personality,' 'reputation,' and 'identity' the true state of my self is being revealed. But instead of finding the ugliness of old scars and flaking skin I am finding a new creature, smooth and strong and swift. It is not the 'me' of emptiness and ugliness that I feared, to the praise of His glorious grace.

But neither is it a 'me' of comfort and complacency. Its newness and passion are frightening - who knows where I will take me when I am him. And so I find myself waking in the morning and smearing on that old makeup, trying to maintain some vestige of my leaden personality. Despite its smothering nature.

But daily, too, I pray God to remove those layers that I add, and those that remain from past years. It is a great credit to His patience that he has not left me to such neuroses. Instead he consistently scrapes away more than I can cake on, bringing his new creature more fully into this world every day, making me daily less 'of the world.'

God, please continue to scrape away that old semblance of personality that I called a self. I want to let your new creation shine in me - I want to be him.