Just Pretending -- Take Two

I just re-read my post about "Just Pretending" from Pollyanna's Attic, and I've re-thought or expounded on a couple different things.

The first is that we cannot hide from God. Too often, we think that the outward things are keeping God from seeing our true selves. In this context, the ideas of not being who we are and "just pretending" are pitiful self-delusion.

I try to close my eyes like a child, playing at a game of hide-and-seek
If I cannot see the Lord, then truly Lord, You cannot see me.
--Jennifer Knapp, "Romans"

To this end, "Just Pretending" makes sense. We cannot get our lives right before we come to the Lord. We can only get ourselves honest enough to admit we need Him, and then come to Him with humilty and gratitude. When it comes to our Heavenly Father, we are just prolonging our pain unless we can "just be who we are."

The second thing is that life is indeed a potent concoction of "mess and mystery." I think my quarrel with "Just Pretending" is that so often today, people see the inherent messiness of it all as an excuse to unload their entire self-destructive ethos upon society at large. That is a denial of the Spirit of self-control, and it troubles me greatly. I am pretty certain that Carolyn no more thinks the object of "being real" consists of "vomiting our wretchedness" upon the general public any more than I. I just differ from her in thinking that people today need very little encouragement to "get real" and need far more encouragement to exhibit propriety.

A third thing that comes to mind is the statistics that show that if people in an unhappy marriage are able to grit their teeth and stick with it for five more years, most couples find that their marriage will undergo a transformation into a positive and happy union. In essence, a determination to "just pretend" -- to go through the motions without the feeling behind them -- can be an amazingly beneficial one for the "pretenders" and society as a whole. A more prosaic example is the wrestling that I have every few weeks or so, wherein I have no desire to attend church services. (A heathenistic lifestyle dies hard.) I grit my teeth and "pretend" to like it, and the Holy Spirit never fails to make that charade a reality.

Anyway, those are three things I wanted to add to my post about "Just Pretending." Never have any other writer's songs stuck in my craw the way, for better or worse, that so many of Carolyn Arends's have. What a testament to her songwriting abilities!