The Cover Up

I have come to despise Axe Body Spray. Not only for their ridiculous innuendoes and quite often blatant sexual references in their ads, but also the product alone turns my stomach. The reason it and all other body sprays are so disgusting to me is that I teach 8th Graders. They believe they have mastered the cover up. Here is the scenario: A male student either fears or knows that they have B.O. so to offset this they use about ½ a can of this on their bodies to cover it up. This is no new phenomenon in the culture of the adolescent male. I will go ahead and confess that when I was in football in Jr. High, and then in high school when I decided doing extra bear crawls because some one else screwed something up was not the program for me and I landed in P.E., I also took part in the cover up. Now I claimed that I didn’t have time to shower, but the fact is I just wasn’t comfortable showering with 25 other guys at a time(another reason to stay out of prison.) We didn’t have Axe body spray or any others. We just had to use cologne and I used a ton of it. I believe at that time in my life I was wearing Preferred Stock by Stetson. Which if you ask me is a great name for cologne. I do wonder if they were referring to the banking/investment term preferred stock or if they were using the term stock to imply livestock or breed. I feel certain it is the second. “If I just wear this cologne I will be able to prove to a woman that I am the special breed of man that she wants to be with.”

Ok, off of memory lane and back to the reason for this post and that is to discuss the cover up. Does the cover up work? No! However for some reason adolescent males are convinced that it does. I try to tell my students that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I also try to warn them that Axe and B.O. combined just mutates into something worse than just B.O. It turns into B.B.O. (Beyond B.O.) and is much worse. If you use Axe spray or cologne to hide the fact that you need a shower, it doesn’t change the fact that you need a shower and quite often makes you need a shower even worse.

The reason I am talking about this is that I feel like to many people are living their lives trying to cover things up. We cover up sin, cover up failures, and try to hide who we truly are. As Christians we need to stop the cover ups. There is nothing I can do that will justify me. There is no act of love that we can do to change the fact that we need to be cleansed. The cover up is both hypocritical and Pharisaical. It is just whitewashed tombs looking nice on the outside to hide the death and filth on the inside (Matthew 23:27) Giving a list of things that we did to cover up the filth will not work. “Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.” But I will reply, “Depart from me, I never knew you.”

Don’t cover your filth up. Let Jesus cleanse you of it all.