Love Skin Deep

I’ve realized that the closer you get to someone the uglier they become. From afar, people look nice. They look beautiful and handsome. However, as we get closer, we start to notice the blemishes on their skin. Their flaws seem to become more pronounced and their beauty seems to diminish and fade. When we first meet someone, we become easily infatuated with the front that they put up. However, as we start to go deeper and notice the ugliness and sin behind the mask, we realize that there’s more to people than we think. Likewise, we are afraid to show people our true selves. I think that this is one condition of the human soul. As we become more intimately acquainted with people, we notice the broken and sinfulness of the human soul. We notice the perversion, selfishness, and jealousy in the heart.

For this reason, I have trouble building truly intimate and transparent relationships. The world sees my shell, but they never see the person I am when I am alone. Transparency is hard, because it exposes the truth that people are not as good as they think they are. People do not know the person I truly am. I would say that people generally describe me as a nice person, but what they see is only a little bit of the person I am, good and bad. If people were only able to enter into my mind, or constantly be with me, they would see the jealousy, lust, pride, and selfishness.

Then what is the point in having deep relationships when all they lead to is brokenness? One thing is that the only person in the entire world who doesn’t get uglier when I get closer is Jesus. When I look deeper into the character and heart of Jesus, I find more and more of his beauty and grace. I see the humanity and inner turmoil of Christ, I see the weight of temptation that he carried, and I see the strength and beauty of a Christ which overcame all those things. Also, Christ sees us all the way to the core. God is able to know us more intimately than we even know ourselves. Yet, even when God is able to see all this rebellion and pain, he still loves us. What grace is that, to die for such a wretched creature as I. And that is God’s redemptive processes, that as we continue to reveal our brokenness to Christ, he continues to repair those things. He wants to take our shame, and he has through the cross. What miraculous power, to take our shame and use that for the glory of God. Be careful as you continue to meet people and go deeper with them cause loving them will become harder and harder. Love is hard. The shallow love of what the world considers beautiful is easy and cheap while the deep love of what the world calls broken and ugly is hard and costly. God did the latter and he calls us to do the same.