The scarring moments of guilt, shame, or fear become the core ingredients of our false-self construct: a collection of masks crafted from the wounded moments in our life. As long as we believe the lies, we will hide behind the masks. They feel normal, comfortable. But when we hide behind them, believing they’re our real self or that they will protect or provide for us, then we are prisoners. Masks allow no place for our true identity to be true in our life. Love cannot penetrate a mask.
We must undergo surgery for the removal of the masks.
Until we do, our false self will ensure that we live a life of bondage shaped by a wounded heart - a life far from the abundant one for which our Father created us and Christ ransomed us. Men who settle for such a half-life are not free. Paroled and free aren’t the same; it’s freedom, nothing less, that Christ has accomplished for us.
Now he calls us to claim that freedom, the freedom that is rightfully ours.
An excerpt from The Heart of a Warrior Journal Workbook.
