The Naked Truth

What is it with men and nudity? Its as if they are born with a vendetta against clothes. Watch any group of preschoolers, and there will be at least one who will strip down the second the teacher's back is turned. I knew a guy in high school who always signed his letters and e-mails with Micah 1:8 written underneath his name; its doubtful anyone ever looked that verse up to see what it said, but I think they would have been surprised!¹ I had another friend who's grandmother tattled that they couldn't keep clothes on the boy until he was 11yrs old. Each time they would turn around he was naked again. I don't think men are mad at Eve so much for getting kicked out of the Garden as for making them have to wear clothes.
I was sitting out the other morning when this man came jogging up to me and asked me how to get to a good jogging trail. He was wearing a pair of gray shorts that would have fit a 4yr old, and that was all - well, I suppose he had on shoes, but I didn't look. Actually, I could hardly look at him at all. I was not that he was flabby - because I couldn't see an inch of fat anywhere, and he wasn't hiding much - it was more that he was practically naked, and despite what they think, naked is NOT a good look on most any man. As he stood there prancing in place (to keep warm most likely) I had to tell him that it was against campus policy for men to be without their shirts. Since he was almost off campus anyway, he continued with his jog. Normally I would have been worried that someone going jogging before dawn in that area might get mugged, but anyone could see that he didn't have anything on him.
The next day I watched him running down the street again, this time in tiny red shorts. He was headed back on campus; he stopped at the front gate and plucked a shirt out of the bushes and slipped it on before entering. For some reason he was determined to run around scantily clad. Maybe he thought he looked hot (or cool) that way.
So often we do things to try to impress people or express ourselves, and we don't realize that we just look silly and naked (not a good naked either). We "dress for success" and try to "fake it till we make it." We worry about what people see when they look at us, about what they think about us. We seem to think that image is everything, so we run our government by opinion polls. We spend so much time worrying about our outside ans our image that we forget that its whats inside that counts the most. We have become like whitewashed tombs - pretty on the outside, filled with shriveled nastiness on the inside.² We tend that who a person is and what a person thinks on the inside is what defines him.³ Perhaps we need to stop comparing what we see in the mirror with what we see in magazines and start comparing our hearts to God's. Maybe we wouldn't like what we see half so much, but that doesn't mean we don't need to see it desperately.

¹"...I will go stripped and naked..."
²Matthew 23:27
³Proverbs 23:7