I think most of us do not know who Merle Oberon was.  Well, I did not, either, until I came across this article about her.  She’s an actor who was nominated for an Oscar in 1935, for her movie, “The Dark Angel.”  But what caught my attention was not this part of her life, but rather the part of her life that she kept a secret her entire life: that she was half Asian!  She was born to a British father, a soldier, and an Indian mother, from what is now Sri Lanka, and her name was Estelle Merle Thompson.  Her elder sister was her mother and the mother who raised them was actually her grandmother.  What’s sad is that when people met her darker-skinned grandmother, she’d tell them that her grandmother was her maid.  She’s simply afraid.

When I read this, I could not help but feel for her.  She grew up poor and being a mixed race made it more difficult.  To alter the course of her life, she, then, created another story—that her father was a British officer and that her parents lived in India before moving to Tasmania.  None of it was true but to survive in Hollywood, she had to create this story and lived this one big lie till the day she died!  I could only imagine how tough it was to live with the fear of being found out, but perhaps I am wrong.  Maybe she did have a good life.

We’d like to think that feeling guilty is the worst feeling we can ever experience, but the truth is, no it’s not!  There’s another feeling that is far worse: feeling ashamed of ourselves. You see, even though it’s difficult we can still talk about our guilt.  What we cannot talk about is shame—what we did in the past or like Merle Oberon, where we came from, and who we were before we became who we are today.  Guilt drives us to hide from others; shame drives us to hide from us. Here is the good news: God’s grace calls us to come out of hiding.  We come to God not because we have no place to hide from Him, but because as Our Heavenly Father, He loves us, just as we are.

Pastor Paul