The words, “The most courageous thing we can ever do is to be who God created us to be” challenge. We spend so much time skirting around that very “trueness” of God’s intention for our lives. The good news of course is that God’s intention is who He has already created you to be! These words of Anne Lamott get right to it:
We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations with how people perceive us, how to get more of the things that we think will make us happy, and with keeping our weight down. So the real issue is how do we gently stop being who we aren’t? How do we relieve ourselves of the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain, and the psychic Spanx that keeps us smaller and contained?
Here’s how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake’s line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
And God is for us in that endeavor, a fact lost in many religious circles. He not only remains steadfastly for us in that endeavor but modeled the journey himself … no small miracle… in Christ, “God as a human being.” (True Christianity 538) More interested in our character than in our comfort, there may just be place to rest for you there. Knowing that with mess, comes the answer. He lives it. So can we.
