Truth in Packaging

Have you ever bought something you thought was one thing and after opening the package found out that it was something entirely different. Those of you who know me will understand my frustration today after lunch when someone gave me a piece of candy wrapped in a brown wrapper with a pink swirl that said strawberry & creme. Well....it was wrapped in brown paper...it should have been at least part chocolate. NOT SO...it was hard like a peppermint but didn't even have the good grace to be peppermint...it was strawberry. Yuk.
Think about how we package our lives. Do we practice truth in packaging or do we put on one costume and then act like someone else? If we put on the packaging of kindness and then act unkind we confuse people. If we put on the packaging of a Christian and act unchristian, we are giving people the wrong opinion of Christianity.
But it is sometimes very difficult to live up to our package. Sometimes an agent builds us up as something we are not, or more than we can be, and brands us with a wrapping we can't live up to. That happens to us a lot, but I guess the best we can do it try to live up to the package and hope that we are received with more grace than I gave that poor piece of candy, when people are disappointed in us.
We should always build our own package so it looks as much like us as possible. One of my favorite quotes, "To thine ownself be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Hamlet, Shakespeare