I’ve spent time polishing my reputation. I’ve also had the experience of finding out what the polish was hiding.
Polishing has better furniture. Taking a look underneath has better lighting. Neither offers complimentary breakfast.
There’s a peculiar thing about reputation. It’s the version of you that exists in rooms you haven’t entered, conversations you haven’t heard, and minds you have absolutely no control over. Character, on the other hand, is what remains when the audience leaves.
I’ve had plenty of time lately to contemplate the difference. Not exactly by choice. My life has taken a few turns that weren’t included in the brochure. There have been courtrooms, jail cells, treatment facilities, hospital rooms, and enough paperwork to qualify as a small rainforest.
The Beautiful Exterior
We live in a world obsessed with appearances. The right house. The right clothes. The right friends. The right church. The right photograph taken at precisely the right angle.
The problem with a veneer is that it isn’t necessarily false. It’s simply incomplete. A beautiful piece of furniture may have a thin layer of expensive wood covering something considerably cheaper underneath. From across the room, nobody knows the difference. Until somebody scratches the surface.
Life has a way of doing that. Sometimes with sandpaper. Sometimes with a belt sander. And occasionally with what appears to be industrial excavation equipment.
The Man in the Mirror
Recovery has forced me to confront some things about myself that I would have preferred to leave undisturbed. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve hurt people. I’ve said things I wish I could retrieve, made decisions I wish I could reverse, and spent more time defending myself than examining myself.
One of the most valuable things I’ve learned in recovery is that admitting wrongdoing doesn’t require accepting every accusation somebody makes about you. Those are two different things.
I can acknowledge my failures without pretending that every judgment passed against me is accurate. I can take responsibility for my conduct without surrendering my understanding of what actually happened. And I can forgive people without agreeing with everything they’ve done.
The Audience
The stage taught me something about appearances. An audience sees the performance. They don’t see the rehearsal. They don’t see the arguments, the missed notes, the broken equipment, or the exhausted musician wondering whether he should have become an accountant. They see the finished product.
The People Who Matter
There are two young women whose opinions matter to me more than any public audience ever could. My daughters.
I miss them. There isn’t a clever punch line for that. No sarcastic observation. No amusing comparison involving musicians, courtrooms, or complimentary breakfast. I simply miss them.
I cannot dictate what they believe. I cannot demand that they understand everything I’ve experienced. And I cannot repair every relationship simply because I want to. Trust must be earned. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes painfully. Sometimes without any guarantee that the effort will produce the outcome we hope for.
But love doesn’t disappear merely because circumstances become complicated. And the absence of contact doesn’t mean the absence of love.
The Religious Veneer
Jesus had remarkably little patience for religious hypocrisy. This is one of the things I admire most about Him. He didn’t reserve His harshest words for people who openly acknowledged their shortcomings. He reserved them for people who used an appearance of righteousness to conceal what was happening inside.
But love? Mercy? Humility? Forgiveness? Those are considerably harder to counterfeit over time.
And before anyone mistakes this for a sermon directed at somebody else, I should point out that the man writing it has plenty of work left to do. The mirror remains fully operational. Unfortunately.
Beneath the Surface
But I’ve stopped believing that the goal is to restore some flawless public image. There never was one. There was simply a man living his life, sometimes wisely and sometimes foolishly, while other people formed their own impressions.
The goal now is something simpler. Tell the truth. Stay sober. Keep my commitments. Treat people with dignity. Take responsibility when I’m wrong. Stand by the truth when I’m right. Forgive without pretending that forgiveness erases accountability.
I’ve spent enough time worrying about what people think of me. I’d rather spend the rest of my life working on who I actually am.
Because eventually, every veneer wears thin. And whatever lies underneath is revealed.
— JC
Matthew 23:27 (KJV)
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”
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