Yours, Without Wax.

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I love words.  I adore Latin and Greek and I thoroughly enjoy learning the modern languages that are rooted in Latin.  I especially appreciate what they teach me about the English language.  Still today, when the light bulb goes on and I "get" the hidden meaning behind the roots of a word I get a silly warm fuzzy.

This week the word that warmed the cockles of my heart was "sincere".  I could have told you the Latin roots behind the word, they are almost identical to the Italian words today.  Sine means without, and cere means wax.  So, sincere is literally "without wax".  What I didn't know, keeping the meaning of the word obscure, was the origins of this concept of "without wax".  It happens to be a very enlightening origin that shows why it's so great to know the meanings behind the words we use.

The phrase originated in the world of the craftsman.  Sculptors and potters would sometimes seek to hide or "cover up" cracks and flaws in their workmanship by coating the imperfections with wax.  A quality product would be stamped with a seal reading "sine cere" to guarantee that it had not been doctored in such a way and that what you saw was what you got.  A genuine article.

Things got even more interesting when I looked up the word sincere in the Greek.  It is translated Anupokritos.  "An", again, means "without".  Can you guess what "upokritos" means?  Maybe you got it, it's the word we get our "hypocrite" from.  "Hypocrite" in Greek referred to someone who wore a mask in a play.  Once again, a "cover up".  Just like "sine cere" referred to presenting a genuine article, to be "without hypocrisy" meant to be presenting your genuine self.

I *love* this.  A dear, dear friend of mine brought me to a turning point in my life at a young (enough) age that I will be forever grateful to him (yes, that was you Rene....).  He told me, "Just be sincere.  If you are not sincere you will never feel genuinely loved because even if people love you, you will always harbor the secret fear that if they really knew you they might not love you.  And that will eat away at you like poison, contaminating all your relationships."  Okay, maybe he didn't say that in quite as many words, but that is the message I took from him and I decided then and there that I was going to throw out all of the masks in my proverbial closet, pursue sincerity and throw insecurity and hypocrisy to the winds.  How thankful I am to have learned that lesson early.

I look around and I see that wax and masks are a hot commodity.  No one likes to feel cracked and flawed, much less have those cracks and flaws on display for the world to see.  So what do we do?  We shrink back, cover up, put on false fronts that we think look acceptable and will receive approval from the outsider looking on.  But all the time we are quaking beneath the wax.  Worried that if and when someone does discover our flaws they will look on us with disdain.

When we are sincere we have nothing to hide.  We face the world head on, without wax or masks that seek to cover up who we really are.  The cracks and nicks that we have acquired through the hard knocks of life are a part of our genuine beauty.  They are not ugly scars to be covered up in darkness behind a thick wad of protective sealing, rather they are apertures into our soul, the very soul where God's spirit indwells us.  Those cracks allow His beauty and grace to spill out, shine right through us from the inside out.

"God once said, 'Let the light shine out of the darkness!'  This is the same God who made His light shine in our hearts by letting us know the glory of God that is in the face of Christ.  We have this treasure from God, but we are like clay jars that hold the treasure.  This shows the great power is from God, not from us."  2 Corinthians 4:6,7

Sincerely yours, or.... yours, without wax,

Prairie Chick.