Costume Party

Can you imagine hosting a dinner party where instead of having friends come over and share their lives with you, they came dressed for a costume party and stayed in character all night? It would be an awful party. Johnson writes, “I wonder if this is what it’s like to be Jesus with the church. He’s invited us into his home, not just as friends but as newly adopted members of his family. Even though it was nowhere on the invitation, we tend to show up in costume, never breaking character, pretending to be this perfect version of ourselves. There’s no way to connect with us because we refuse to be real” (Taylor Johnson, In the Altogether [self-publ., 2019], 3).