Authentes

Authentes

While on a mission trip in India with a team from church, my husband experienced something rather strange and unforgettable. One particular day, the team decided to travel an hour outside of Calcutta to one of Mother Theresa’s orphanages. While serving there, a very friendly boy was walking around talking with the Americans. This boy walked up to Rob with a big smile and said, if you can imagine, with an Indian accent in English, “How are you, I am fine.”  How are you? I am fine? This boy looked like a two year old, but the orphanage had estimated his actual age to be 4. He was malnourished. He was in an orphanage with 15 kids and 2 caretakers and he was there because his parents had either died or abandoned him.

How are you? I am fine?

This boy was anything but fine. He had obviously been introduced to this surface talk by an English speaking group or individual (most likely an American missionary group) and was saying this over and over again to whomever he ran across. This is not surprising because we, as people, and perhaps specifically as American people, are very familiar with surface talk. When we meet people at a party, on campus or at work the first question that people ask is What do you do for a living? (As if we can be summed up by our J- O- B.) It is a question we can pull out to get us further down the conversational road until something else comes up. In the realm of surface talk, there is always: What’s new? what’s up? and How’s your week? The classic surface talk is when people ask “how are you?”. And we answer I’m fine. I find it bizarre and even dysfunctional that when we go to the grocery store we use this phrase with the checker, when we get a call from someone we say these meaningless two words, and when we walk into church we even say “I’m fine”, regardless of our current state of “fineness”.  When asked “How you doin’?” we say “Fine”, yet we live in that very moment like the malnourished orphan in India!

Many of us aren’t fine! Some of us are paralyzed by a web of lies that we have spun. Or we are crushed by a shattered dream. We are tired because of our own attempt to be perfect. We are far from fine. And it doesn’t matter what’s new.  It doesn’t matter that we got a new cell phone. It doesn’t matter that we just returned from an adventurous vacation. It
doesn’t matter that we just changed our hair color. It matters that we are being consumed by lustful thoughts that won’t go away. It matters that we feel enslaved to other people. It matters that we have more bitterness than love in our relationships. And no we won’t have a great week because we have to confront someone we love. We won’t have an awesome week because we are living another week doubting our faith, and doing that alone. We won’t have a great week because we have to carry immense pressure on our back. Many of us aren’t fine, yet we are constantly trying to convince people we are fine, independent and in need of no one’s help.

Like the orphan, we also are being taught canned answers. How sick is it that we live in a culture where many of us would rather fake independence than value authenticity? How sick is it that we would rather fake strength than value being real? Somehow this inauthenticity has snuck into Christianity. The very people whose foundation is laid on the belief that we aren’t fully whole, we aren’t right in of ourselves-people whose foundation is: “I’m a sinner in need of God”  –we have in some ways turned Christianity and the church into a place where we are supposedly tough, confident, pillars of strength that have it all together. Who are we kidding? So many of us as Christ followers don’t share what is really going on in our lives. Instead, we try to drop hints of devoutness in our conversations, prove to people how well we are doing and how spiritual we are. I know I do this and maybe you do too.

The word authentic originates from the Greek word authentes, which means; author; coming from the real author, of original or firsthand authority, meaning the one it really is. In a sense, being authentic is not just knowing your story as it is, but telling your story as it is. Each one of us has a story. Everyday adds adventure, romance, mystery, and drama to our story. We have opportunities all the time to connect with people, by keeping it real. Being alone in our stories is a very lonely, disconnected place to be. It is a place where we feel far from people and far from God. I don’t think God is impressed with our inauthenticity and our false images and our put together fines. I actually believe that the more authentic we can be in telling our story as it really is and the more we enter into each other’s stories as well as allow God to enter our stories, the more our stories will experience God’s grace and transformation. Let us be an authentes people.

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