Cover-Up

COVER-UP…….  you hear the word and lots of images come to mind!  My first is “that thing you wear at the pool or beach to hide the fact that you’re in a bathing suit”.  And let me just say that if it’s made of mesh, well it ain’t a cover-up — cause it ain’t really covering nothing!

We also find COVER-UP in our make-up drawers.  And arguably, it might just be the #1 product of choice for the face over 50, and once you hit 60 it’s a certainty.  

As I was getting ready this morning, I was pondering all this and with these thoughts a whir, I began my process.  First step is usually wet hair.  Hair used to be easier.  What happened?  What changed?  I don’t know, but what I do know is that I have more areas to cover-up these days.  I’ve attempted a new style and perhaps that’s part of my problem but as it turns out, I have a back-part.  I didn’t even know there was such a thing until I realized “I got one”!  But thankfully there’s a blog for it.  There quite possibly is a blog for everything, but I digress.  Anyway, I studied the blog, I got the product, and I had no trouble rescinding back to my youth where teasing reigned supreme.  Matter-of-fact the Supremes might just have helped launch all that.  But suffice it to say, I now have a new technique when I fix my hair….. the COVER-UP!  And I could mention the thinning place to the left of my part that I now attempt to disguise, but I’m still somewhat in denial over all that…. so I won’t.

Somehow Kate, the blog gal, pulled all this off with so much more finesse.

And there’s an interesting thing about the cover-up…. THERE’S NO END TO IT!  Even just to take the above pictures, I intentionally went ahead and put on my black sweater (even though it was gonna get hair all over it).  And why? Well to COVER-UP, of course!  Sleeveless was a phenomena of my youth.  

But back to the morning process…..  I’ve recently discovered the miracle of ByeBye….

ByeBye Under Eye! Don’t get me wrong….. I love bags!  Matter-of-fact my daughter gave me a beautiful red goat bag from NoonDay for CHRISTmas this year!  And I love carrying my red goat, but these red bags I wake up with under my eyes….. now that’s another story!  But alas the ByeBye Under Eye has come to revolutionize our morning routines!

But the thing is, after we get all that cover-up installed and get ourselves into a blank state of ivory, of course we need to cover-up all that ivoryness!  We need to put in some coloring and shadows and contours…. so we’ll look “natural”, don’cha know.  

Is there any end to the COVER-UP?

In recipes I try to cover-up too much salt or too much spice. In wardrobe I try to cover-up too many cinnamon buns.  With my dog Rudy I try to cover-up that undeniable doggy smell.  In traffic have you ever tried to cover-up not wanting to let somebody merge in?  If ya don’t actually make eye contact, perhaps they won’t realize that you don’t want to give them a turn, they’ll just think you got distracted and didn’t see them wanting in.  Yeah…sure they will.  Have you ever used your phone as a cover-up?  Maybe you saw somebody you didn’t particularly want to get bogged down with in a conversation, so you grabbed your phone and “made a call”!  That way you could just do the quick wave in the post office and breeze on by with a whispered “call me 🎵sometime”, as you hurried on and continued that important “phone call”!  Perhaps we all need to take inventory and just be conscious of how many times a day we do COVER-UP!

And of course you knew I was headed here…….  we also can tend to cover-up where God is concerned! Do we honestly think that God doesn’t know? Is it even possible that we’d try to cover-up anything with Him?  We would SAY that He is omniscient … of course we would.  God knows EVERYTHING!  But for some strange reason we can tend to put into practice this innocent little justification process over the things we do that we ought not and the things we don’t do that we oughta!  Call it justification…. call it cover-up.  Either way it’s taking what really is and trying to make it seem as if it isn’t.  And we’re pros at it!  Or maybe it’s just me.  

This has all been recently brought to the forefront of my pasty white, covered-up eyes through the writing of Jen Wilkin and her book “None Like Him”.  In it she addresses 10 different attributes of God, …. one of them being His Omniscience, the fact that He knows everything past, present, and future.  An excerpt from her book:

You cannot fool God…. All acting, from the smallest posturing to the greatest pretense is obvious to Him.  To God, we are all bad actors.  No one is up for an Academy Award.  We are completely transparent in every attempt to represent ourselves as something we are not.  Whether it suits us to act as conquering victors or cowering victims, God knows our true measure.  But you don’t need to fool God.  He accepts you as you are, all attempt at artifice removed.  The cross effectively removes our need to overplay our strengths or our weaknesses.  “You have searched me, Lord, and You know me.  You know when I sit and when I rise; You perceive my thoughts from afar.  You discern my going out and my lying down; You are familiar with all my ways.”  (Psalm 139:1-3 NIV).

So let’s turn on the light of truth and see ourselves laid bare before God! The only cover-up we need before Him is the blood of His Son Jesus Christ, covering up our shortfalls, our shame, our sin.  Covered by His blood, we can stand pure and righteous and forgiven….. made new!  Now that’s REAL BEAUTY!