Just a week ago South Australia made the decision to drop the mandate to wear face masks. So what had been mandated was all of sudden not required. What changed between the 14th and 15th of April I truly don’t know, but that is another story in itself.
What I do know is that even just a few days since the release I have noticed something different. I have noticed that we will live in a world of faces again. Each face is uniquely made and capable of a full range of emotion.
Return of the face again
I have seen people smile with full grins of big shiny white teeth and I have seen faces that are sad with something deeply troubling them that was hidden behind a bit of cloth and two rubber bands.
I think one of the things that has been revealed to me is that we finally are able to experience being human again. Often in the season of the mask, I had thoughts going around my head about the fact that we were more like robots than humans.
What I realise as I write this article today is that we have been becoming like robots long before we had a pandemic hit the world and forced us to wear face underwear. We have literally been masking our lives with the devices in our hands.
Living behind a mask
We are living behind the mask of reality in exchange for hyper-reality or a reality that is completely crafted by us and what we want to communicate to the world that really is not the true self. It's not the reality that says that sometimes life is really tough and I just need someone to talk to, to be real with and connect with. Isn't that what being human is all about? To be connected emotionally, spiritually and physically really is the essence of being human.
Don’t get me wrong sometimes we need to ‘mask’ ourselves, we need to internalise our emotions and work through them. Sometimes this is a really good thing and enables us to connect with our inner selves again, but should we stop there.
My challenge is that we don’t stop there at ourselves. To connect with someone has become about a status update that goes to our so-called 1300 friends on Facebook. We are generally just hoping that someone is reading them and not just going to keep scrolling through their news feeds.
Resetting to the original blueprint
God instigated family and instigated from the very beginning in a garden called Eden the first relationship between two different people. These two people we know as Adam and Eve and they were the first two humans that had the opportunity to connect, relate and bond over their emotions as they were living in this new beautiful world around them. This original relationship was the blueprint of what it was to be truly human. To be able to explore, receive, learn and grow together in the presence of one another. These two were not distracted by devices, unnecessary technology or the lie that what they were given was not enough.
There is something about this simple existence of connection and true relationship that has been lost on us today. I think we need to find it again and rediscover the beauty that is life beyond the masks we cover ourselves with.
We just like Adam and Eve fall into temptation and believe lies that what we have been given isn’t enough. We find ourselves just like them covering ourselves in excuses, untruths and in sin. This is literally was it meant when Adam and Eve covered themselves in leaves revealing first the first time their nakedness.
Going forward as we walk through this pandemic with the residue of it still around let us connect, remove the masks from our lives and look up to see the big beautiful world that God has gifted us with to learn, grow and live life fully every day.