LIVING aUTHENTICALLY: By Accepting Weakness

I hope you will forgive me for cutting and pasting an entire post. It is a habit that I have tried to escape. However, I think that this is a good article and, for me at least, a timely reminder.

LIVING AUTHENTICALLY: By Accepting Weakness by Ryan Taylor at The Ooze

Showing off our weaknesses is never sexy. Can you imagine a locker room conversation at your local 24 Hour Fitness where sweaty guys are standing around after a workout discussing how emotionally or spiritually screwed up they feel? Or how about a water cooler discussion at work where someone exposes their desperate need to find some purpose to life? Doesn’t sound familiar? It shouldn’t in a culture in which we strive to display a polished exterior while living in fear of exposing the reality of the mess that lies underneath it all.

Henri Nouwen was an Ivy League scholar and priest who, in the last 10 years of his life, chose to work and live among a handful of severely handicapped people and give up his well earned success and effective public ministry. In Finding My Way Home (Crossroad/Herder & Herder), he shared, “What I believed I was doing was called ‘ministry.’ It was named ‘ministry of justice and peace,’ ‘ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation,’ ‘ministry of healing and wholeness,’ but there was disparity for me between the words and the experience. This experience causes me to ask myself, ‘When I work for peace and am as interested in success, popularity, and power as those who want war, what then is the real difference between us?’”

As a frequent reader of Nouwen, I have found that somewhere along his journey he discovered the ultimate value of living a life of authenticity and exposed weakness. Nouwen strove to live by the standard modeled before him in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. To be authentic, by the standard of Christ, is to die to everything we hope people will admire about us and all personal desires for power, wealth, or public standing. All corporate and individual ideals of power and success were put to shame by a powerful display of weakness. When Jesus Christ died on the cross the popular appearance of might and power were absent. Through that display of weakness we now have the liberty to let people now see us for who we really are. God’s favor for us is based on the humility and submissiveness of his son, not by any merit or accomplishments of our own.

The apostle Paul describes the humility and submissiveness of Christ in the book of Phillippians chapter 2, verses 6-9. “Although He existed in the form of God, he did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, the name which is above every name.” (NRSV)

The 20 something culture seems to value or at least have the appearance of valuing authenticity. In order to authentically live authentic lives, we must put away our assumptions of what we think that means and examine the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. This Gospel is one that liberates us to not be afraid of one another and to speak honestly to each other about what’s really going on in our lives. Instead of desperately attempting to hide those dark times of depression, despair, and confussion, the Bible says lets open it up in our Kingdom communities. As I enter this last year of my 20’s I’m realizing that if we stop dressing ourselves up during those dark times and speak openly and open our ears and eyes for others, we just might discover that we are in the very presence of God.