Archive for Authenticity
Hide or Seek
Posted by: | CommentsHide and Seek
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…
Ready or not – Here I come!
The object of the old childhood game is to hide well enough that no one will find you. If no one finds you, you win.
I think that is a pretty good picture of how we often live. We look for the best hiding places; places to hide our true heart, our emotions, our giftings, our anger, our thoughts. We try to hide so well that no one will see us. And then, if no one finds us, we declare that we have won!
Yet when we choose to hide our true self in our relationships, instead of winning, we actually lose. We lose the opportunity to be truly known and loved for who we really are.
We hide our faces, our hearts, our fears, and our failures from each other. We then declare that we have won. Oh, not verbally, but deeply within our hearts. It is too risky to allow someone else to see our most intimate thoughts and feelings. We even convince ourselves that we can hide from God. And the paradox of it all is that in the hiding of our hearts, we effectively prevent ourselves from receiving the love of God and the love of others.
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“Can You Identify Yourself?”
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Okay, I admit it. This joke is always told about a young woman instead of a man, but I think that is gender bias so I tweaked it a bit!
Identity has become a huge concern in our world today. We have identity crises. We have identity security. We have identity theft. My only problem so far is that no one has wanted to steal my identity!
Well, seriously, every aspect of our lives requires that we identify ourselves. Whether we are traveling through an airport or checking out at Wal-Mart, we are constantly being asked to identify ourselves.
It seems that from the moment we become deeply involved in our worlds, we are always seeking to identify ourselves in some ways. Often we try to be someone we are not because someone else’s identity seems so much more desirable than our own. During our school days, we long to be in the popular crowd. We long for acceptance and often act like a chameleon so that some one will just accept us. How deceived we are for what good is acceptance when it is based on inauthenticity? Tragically, our opinions and values sometimes change moment by moment depending upon who we are with and how dominant their personality is.
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