ABOUT CONVICTION IN CARRYING OUT A LIFE ROLE

Josef Meier and fellow actress taking a break to read fan mail and sign autographs at the Black Hills Passion Play in Lake Wales. Josef Meier portrayed Jesus Christ in the Black Hillls Passion Play for several decades.

Author Marcus Bach, recognized as a leading authority on the world's religions and inter-cultural relations, once interviewed Josef Meier, the actor who for many years played the part of Jesus in a highly successful "Passion Play." Mr. Meier, who had enacted the role more than four thousand times, told Bach a secret. 

Meier said there was a period in the early history of the remarkable play when it seemed that the performances would never "catch on." There was something about the production and the organization that just "didn't click." Often, he would meet with the rest of the cast, and they would discuss the advisability of giving up and disbanding. 

What miracle then occurred to turn the project from failure to phenomenal success? Here is how Meier explained it:

"One evening when I was playing the part of the Christus, as I had done many times before, and a night when there were very few people in the audience, and hope was running low, I came to the lines in the play where Jesus says, 'Why take ye thought for the morrow, O ye of little faith?' I had said these words many, many times. On this particular night I heard myself saying this line as I had often done, but something happened.

For the first time, I asked myself, 'Josef Meier, why don't you have the will to believe these words with you heart? Don't just say them, believe them'."

Then he went on to say,

"Like a flash it dawned on me that I had been playing the part of the Christ without actually believing as He believed or living the faith as He had lived it. I don't know whether the spectators sensed that I paused momentarily at this point, but something was happening to me. Belief ... trust ... conviction came to me and from that moment on a change took place in everything connected with the Passion Play and its future."

Can we help but wonder how often we play a role in life for the sake of an audience, but down deep lack trust and conviction in carrying it out for real.

Why did this story suddenly come to me out of nowhere?

I don't know about your dear reader, but I have to look in the mirror on this one...And wonder!