Someone Else

The Spirit of the Lord will come upon you . . . and you will be changed into a different person.  1 Samuel 10:6

I keep forgetting who I am.

So I'm rehearsals for this play. It's called Leaving Iowa, and it's a hoot. I get to play five different characters in the play. Five! How awesome is that?

At one point in the second act I become three different people in the space of two pages. It makes my head spin!

Not that I'm complaining. The more roles the merrier, as far as I'm concerned. I love climbing into someone else's head and playing around in there for a little while. When I step into the theater I shake off the everyday and become...a cheerful small-town waitress. Bursitis-ridden Aunt Phyllis. A hog farmer's wife who has found the secret to contentment.

The most fun characters to play are the ones that are not like me at all. Holy cow, what fun it is to clomp about in a hideous hat and garish dress, complaining loudly in an awful New York accent. I never get to do that in real life!

It's just nice to get to be someone else for a while.

Because sometimes I need a break from being who I am.

I know a lot of people are afraid of being in front of a crowd, but to me the stage is the one place that is safe. I mean, think about it. In real life, there's no script. No guarantee that there will be a happy ending. In real life, I am me and nobody else, whether I like it or not.

On stage, though, I don't have to be the same old me I always am. I can slip into someone else's skin and live their life for a little while. Their words are all written out for me, their difficult situations neatly resolved by the time the curtain closes.

I want to live a life like that, neat and tidy and safe. Sometimes, when I put on that other person, I wish I didn't have to leave.

It seems perfect to me that our show opens on Halloween weekend. Costumes! Halloween is all about being someone else. The sky's the limit of who you can be on October 31st. Clone trooper? No problem. Slap on a white helmet and you're good to go. Time lord? Just need a fez and a bowtie. If you can dream it, you can be it!

And the children merrily don their masks and wigs and capes and look at themselves in the mirror and rejoice in the chance to be someone else.

Life isn't all that bad, most of the time. But still. Look around. Look at the television, the magazines. Look at the person next to you. Other people have it better, surely they do. Other people know what to say and who to be. They seem so content with who they are. If only it were possible to wear their shoes for a while.

We all have moments when we wish we were someone else. A thin person. A wealthy person. A healthy person. A person who gets to take a break once in a while. We dream of another life, a better life, a life in which we are someone else.

While we struggle with who we are, there is one person we will never be - a person unloved by God.

Instead, someone else - our Jesus - was condemned in our place and crucified for our wrongs that we could daily become someone else, a new creation in Christ, forgiven and redeemed through Him.

Sometimes I forget who I am. I'm not just me. I'm someone else, too. God looked past all the masks that I try to put on and saw the real-life me inside. He saw that I needed Him. He put His loving Word in my heart, and wrote the ending to my story.

Because of the cross, we are changed, each one of us, into a different person. A complete person. A real person. A whole and wholly loved child of God.

Because of Jesus, we are exactly who we ought to be.

First published in The Alpena News, October 17, 2015