Dressed Up

One day a year, there is an interesting tradition in which it is socially acceptable to go about in public wearing a different persona. For a few hours, kids (and adults) have a chance to "be" someone else, and the streets are flooded with superheroes, talking animals, ghouls, wizards, and princesses, like a hundred storybooks come to life. I'm not a particular fan of Halloween, but the opportunity to dress up makes me think -- what is it that makes this role play parade so attractive? What inspires children to don unusual outfits any day they're allowed, and adults to let out that same inner child once a year?

Children, with their lives ahead of them, believe they can be anything. They don't feel silly dancing around the living room in frilly dresses or spurring their bicycles in their cowboy boots, because in their minds, they are princesses and cowboys. They costumes they put on bring their imagination to life and make it real. As adults, our costumes change: scrubs, aprons, business casual, grease-stained coveralls. What we wear shows the world what we are and lets us live out our roles. We're old enough to know now that putting on different clothes doesn't automatically change our destiny, but maybe we miss the childhood freedom of being a firefighter one day and a woodland archer the next, as easily as rummaging through the dress-up box.

What we wear may be an expression of what is inside us, but it is just as true that what we put on actually has a peculiar way of influencing our very being. You behave differently in workout gear than you do in formal attire, even if you're not actually at the gym or a wedding. Perhaps that's why Scripture so often speaks of our spiritual lives in terms of clothing. We are decked in the garments of salvation, head to the front lines in the armor of God, and look forward to dazzling robes in glory. Above all, every believer has put on Christ. You are dressed up as Jesus every day of the year -- are you living out your role?

For all of you who were baptized into Christ

have clothed yourselves with Christ.

Galatians 3:27