Have you had the experience lately of being asked if you are all right because in the inquirer’s opinion you don’t “seem to be yourself”?  How can someone tell when we are being ourselves?  How do you determine for yourself if you are “being yourself”? Well generally such a question indicates that we are temporarily acting in a way that is not our normal way of acting, and it has caught someone’s attention.

            I want to suggest that it is also possible that many of us live a good portion of our lives not being our true selves. I believe that we are even able to live in this way without being aware of it and actually not knowing who or what our true self really is! Wow, sounds sad (and complicated), doesn’t it?  But it happens, and it’s sadly a very common human experience.

            So, how do we begin to know whether we are or aren’t being our true selves?  Well I believe it first begins not with a look at ourselves, but with a look at God. Because you see, the Bible tells us that we are all created in the image of God.  Within each of us, we carry the image of God. So to know whether or not we are living true to who we are, we need to look to God in whose image we are created.

            To define what God’s image is, we need to define the essence of God. Whoah! That’s too big of a job for even a lifetime, much less a short article. And further, we will never fully know or understand God in this life; there is much that remains mystery, because no matter how like God we are created, God is still so totally other than we are. But we do know some things about God through the witness of scripture and the person and words of Jesus. And God’s essence is this… God is love, and that love exists only in authentic relationship. Internally with God, we see the intimate relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Externally, we see God’s desire to be in intimate relationship with us, his creation.

So what does that mean for our question at hand? Well God has created us to also live in authentic relationship. Are we living that way? Or are we going our own way?  Most everything within our culture tells us that our goal should be to be independent. We finally amount to something when we can take care of ourselves.  Do you have a problem you are trying to overcome? Then look for the right self-help book to fix yourself.  Who are the most lauded and admired people? Self-made people who weren’t given a handout or hand up, but who made it on their own.  When people reach the end of their rope and life gets overwhelming, the tendency is to self-medicate, usually in some destructive way, rather than reach out for help from someone else because that would be seen as a sign of weakness instead of strength.

We can begin to see how our culture of independence tears away at our ability to become our true selves; the selves that God created and dreams for us to be. God desires us to be open to one another and connected deeply and authentically with one another because he knows that we will find our deepest joy only when we are. How does God know this? Because God lives this way and loves it! And God longs for us to share in that joy by living the same way!

May we wake up to who we truly are, to what our true self really is, and may we begin to depend on God and one another to help us grow up into our true dependent, inter-related selves, finding deep joy in our authentic relationships with God and one another. May we rely on God’s grace and strength to do so!