Authenticity.

The originals.

Who comes to mind when you think of them?

The Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel.

Picasso.

The greats.

Maybe Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Or, the beautiful works of Monet.

These were artists who profoundly impacted history with their amazing gifts. Individuals whose lives made a mark on this world. Whose legacy has lived on for hundreds of years ~ a sharing of the creative, human spirit. Art forms that continue to inspire wonder and appreciation after all this time.

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What if we were to be so bold?

To discover our own hidden beauty. Our talents. Our passions. To embrace God’s treasures in us.

How amazing that would be!

But more times than not, those incredible parts of us become buried.

Somewhere under the shame and the guilt. Beneath the sorrowful brokenness. Crushed below the weight of fear and the burden of disbelief.

They remain. 

The tender, lovely pieces of who we were created to be. Waiting to be illuminated by the perfect Love of Christ.

But in this world filled with it’s pain, we get good at covering up.

After a foundation layer of wounding messages, like “You’re not good enough”,  it becomes all too familiar to accept another blanket of lies. One after another.

“How could anyone love you?” “You’ll never amount to anything.” “You’re worthless.”

Before long, we find ourselves wrapped in a cocoon of the enemy’s deceit.

Failures wrapped tightly around us.

We feel suffocated.

We feel frightened.

Alone.

…

I have spent decades trying to cover them up.

My scars.

Sometimes the visual memories of physical pain.

A burn from the oven baking brownies with my daughter.  A cut from a box knife when I was just fourteen ~ working at the local hardware store, opening cardboard containers. Plastic surgery on my forehead when I had fallen from the monkey bars onto the asphalt of the school playground.

But some scars leave us with more traumatic memories.

For me, it was the summer of my sixth year. We were playing outside and racing to the front door, my oldest brother and me. I was winning. I looked back to see where he was as my hand outstretched, reaching for the doorknob.

Then came the sound of the crashing.

My arm had pushed through and shattered the glass.

I remember the crimson stained towels. Lots of them. All wrapped tightly around my bleeding wrist. The cold, wet feeling of saturated cloth. I’ll never forget the fear coursing through my body as my mother drove faster than I had ever seen her. Rushing past a blur of cars to the hospital. The horn ~ a constant blowing. Running red lights until we made it to the emergency room.

A nice doctor with a funny tie.

And stitches ~ more than I could ever begin to count.

…

Some of our scars aren’t so easily seen.

The emotional wounds.

Disfigurements of the heart.

The psychological blemishes on our souls. Past hurts from broken dreams. A fragmented childhood ~ innocence lost. Or the dark breath of abandonment, seeping into the crevices of a fractured, tiny soul.

These untold pieces of our histories, carved into the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ that we have become. We carry them with us in the bundled up, and tucked away parts that we choose to hide from the world. Scared of what they might see. What we see as reality in the mirror. The person that we think we are.

Damaged goods.

Shattered remains & cluttered chaos.

The disintegrated images we hold of ourselves.

Fortunately, this is not the truth.

Our Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves.

Still buried and crying out for recognition, are those pieces of us painstakingly molded and smoothed by our Creator.

The lover of our souls.  

The life-breath inside of us.

Here, beneath the sin waged against us, is the real and true image our God intended us to be.

The authentic version of ourselves. 

The original.

The one and only you.

The one and only me.

Logic tells us that in order to reach that part of ourselves, we would have to again acknowledge the layers of unkindness. The cruelties. The hurts. That we would have to pull back the layers and re-live the brutalities.

But the Cross says otherwise.

In His death we can begin to see beauty in overwhelming burden.

His promise of eternal Life.

His Grace.

Instead, we are given the opportunity to surrender our old selves. Our old hurts. The entanglement of lies can no longer hold us captive. For when we choose to give our lives to Christ, He gently peels back the layers.

With love. 

With care.

He reveals beauty in the pain.

And helps us to see redemption in in all.

Romans 8:28

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.

He transforms our scars, our painful experiences into stories that we can use to bring people closer to Him.

Beauty from ashes.

Life from death.

…

The real, authentic me is emerging as my relationship with Christ deepens.

I am changed.

And in Him I am free.

My battle wounds, soul scars and blemishes are now reminders of how He has carried me through.

Every time.

Relentlessly unfailing.

The stories of how people are born-again in Christ are fascinating to me. I hear reflections of dramatic conversions. Some overnight, even. My process has been much slower. A gradual turning.

(God must have known that I don’t handle those quick transitions very easily.)

When we spend time, resting in His grace and developing our relationship with Jesus, we come to find our true identity.

The image of ourselves, and of others, begins to take a new form.

Filling a new space.

We see and appreciate the weary traveler in the soul of another. Compassion emerges. Recognizing that we are all more alike than we are different. We see similar scars. The same fear and tendency toward hiding. The covering up.

Through Christ, we can see beyond the hurt and into the heart of another.

In time, we can come to see ourselves with a softened lens as well.

We learn to appreciate how we came to be.

Our authentic selves.

The compilation of our experiences. The good and the not-so-charming. The lovely and the scarred gradually blended together. When pain and sorrow are mixed gently with the gift of His Grace, we discover a new recipe for living.

A heightened sense of gratitude.

A taste of Joy.

And an appreciation for what we have gone through and how we have grown.