Do you ever come across an image in your daily life that makes you stop and think? Something so random that you become overwhelmed by an emotion, a thought, or a feeling? If we could only embrace that moment, we could be surprised by the depth of its meaning. One of those occasions in my daily life was a late, but necessary driveway reparation, where small cracks in the asphalt had to be filled before the first frost. As I looked at the black asphalt in the container, I was perplexed by its thick density, smell, and black color. For somebody who is not familiar with this material, it was a really strange and unpleasant image. What was even more surprising, the liquid asphalt was able to completely cover all of the imperfections of my driveway including stains, cracks and holes. At the very end, the surface looked really good. The smoothness of the surface of my driveway was quite impressive.

As I looked at the surface, I was struck by a similar image from our day-to-day life. Very often in our lives, in order to hide our daily problems and challenges, we “paint” our imperfections with an image of abundant happiness, success and glowing smiles. Our lives could be quite troublesome, but we, unable to accept it, portray ourselves completely immune of any problems. We become so sophisticated in this artificial portrayal of our untruthful lives that we even give advice to our friends on how to deal with their issues. We continually mimic a perfect and successful image as this is expected in our contemporary society. Deep down, underneath this “black asphalt” of dishonesty, there are real cracks in our lives, which are only getting deeper and wider as we continue to face ongoing challenges. Here are a couple examples that reflect the ability for us to hide our troubles.

One of those examples could be our personal relationship with our spouses. A disastrous marital relationship, perplexed by betrayal, mistrust and void of emotion, could be portrayed by the visual appearance of a successful home, magnificent trips abroad, or even by fantastic dinners for friends and family. We erroneously show that our marriage is full of love and completeness. In order to appear good and be accepted by our friends, we will go to the extent of painting and filling the cracks within our marriages with those images as expected by our society. If we want to maintain the status quo, it is acceptable to use any kind of approach as long as this serves our image of a successful marriage. It is an image of “black asphalt” on a driveway, which hides everything.

Another example could be a commitment to the parish family, where we show ourselves to be seen as compassionate and faithful to our faith. We portray ourselves as a faithful family committed to the commandments of God, donating abundantly to parish projects, or even participating in the liturgical life of church. In reality, under this “black asphalt” of false images, there are irreparable cracks of a dysfunctional family unit on the verge of collapse. Only at the time of crisis our faith and commitment to God are tested. The “black asphalt” of false religiosity ends up in a total collapse of family unit, disappearance from the parish life and total rejection of faith in God.

What would happen if only for a moment we would glimpse into our hearts and recognize the true state of our life? What would it have to take for us to humble ourselves for a moment in order to look beyond the “black asphalt” of our daily camouflage? This could be the day, when kneeling in prayer to God for help, we could face the challenges that are the deep cracks in our life. It is these moments that

God repairs and strengthens us from within where we no longer need the “black asphalt” to camouflage our lives.

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7