The Sustenance of Integrity Through Authenticity

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.”

— Laozi (6^th Century B.C.E.)

Too much of our lives we spend

Wanting to be someone else,

When all God asks us,

Is to be content to know our self.

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Yet, it is difficult to be ourselves – it takes great courage at times to simply be me and you. For starters, we must discern the threats to authenticity before we can understand these are threats to our integrity. Once a threat is discerned – like we are entertaining ‘fake’ and allowing ourselves to carry out that masquerade – we then have the responsibility to perform remedial work to be realer than that in the moment.

It is best for everyone, not least of all ourselves, for us to be our truest selves.

When we can be – when we can allow ourselves to be – because we are bold enough to accept ourselves in that given moment – then we give to others an authentic experience of ourselves that is bloated with integrity.

We are beautifully made, delicately poised, and specifically purposed – to live the lives we have been given. Our bodies are not our own – they were given to us, notwithstanding we may have developed them – but our minds are ours once we assume possession. And still, the mind may be considered the same – a faculty given to us for use to the glory of God.

The Source of True Contentment – Accepting God’s Work In Us

Once we accept God’s interest and work in us, as individuals, we can then bend every effort toward living simply as we ourselves are.

There is so much grace divested in each of us that self-acceptance should be a no-brainer. We have been gifted life when trillions upon trillions of would-be human material is never to be brought into union with a mate – the making of one zygote. We are all very, very special and unique; God’s grace has been expended into each of us, and God’s grace flows as a continual force forever through us.

These are most acceptable facts, and such facts are but the start of an incontrovertible case.

***

Sustaining our integrity of person is exercised through authenticity – the simplicity of being comfortably and acceptably ourselves. This is about accepting God’s progressive work in us; a work the Lord has promised to complete. We can be really real when we accept that God has done his very best in us. God is no shoddy craftsman.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.