authenticity.
authenticity has been at the forefront for me lately. The subject recently came up in a meeting i listened in on, and all the dialogue exchanged caused me to think pretty seriously about what authenticity means- how can i be more authentic in my spiritual/personal life? Basically, if I could boil down most of my discouragement/frustration in the past six months, it seems to have stemmed directly from a lack of authenticity- both in myself and in others.
Jesus was truly authentic. he said what he meant and meant what he said. He wept and cried out to God in his despair and pain. What do we do? we hide it. We hide our despair because it makes us weak and less than perfect. We believe that our sorrow and our tears are useless, that we aren't strong enough like Jesus was...we think that strength means something altogether different than what it is. I believe strength is found in authenticity. Our ability to be ourselves...angry, tired, confused, wounded- but also compassionate, kind, honest. Jesus was all these things at one point or another in his life. why do we have such a hard time bringing our humanity to God?
If love is to truly flow through us like living water, the source must be a purely authentic place within us. It must be from God.
posted by Lauren at 9:11 PM
1 Comments:
Lauren,
You are right - we do have a hard time being authentic, which really sucks. I think it has to do with a few different things though. One would be our own insecurities, and another (which I think is related) is social conditioning. I think that a lot of us have been brought up inside of Christian circles that actually discourage us from being authentic, real, vulnerable, broken, weak people. I think that a lot of times we think that to be a Christian means to "have it all together," which is complete bs... and so if we don't have it all together (r at least put on a facade and make it look like we do), we become insecure about letting others see the real us out of a fear of rejection or whatever.
This happens to me sometimes but still desperately want to try and be authentic, althought I often times fail at it... but I guess in the end all we can do is try and be real.
Keep blogging please - you seem to have some good things to say.
9:23 AM
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