“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

“The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real, you can’t become unreal. It lasts for always.”

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.

–Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

To thine ownself be true–what does that mean? What does it mean to be yourself, no plastic ways, no personas, but to be authentic?

I don’t have final answers about it, but it seems to me that being authentic is connected to aligning ourselves with the way God intended for us to live and I know  His design is perfect and beautiful, not self-serving or muddy. I think that to be authentic means walking toward His design, living in simplicity and honesty, not needing props to hold up our image.

An article here on Her.meneutics gives some food for thought:

…my entire life has been a struggle to get out from behind the faces I put on: I want to be perceived as having it all together, as being the perfect wife, as being an intelligent Christian woman, as being compassionate, kind, and inspirational. I have justified my slavery to these goals because they are mostly noble, but the method is entirely wrong. When rooted in a desire to be liked rather than in the spirit of Christ, each one of these “fruits” is an illusion, a fake.

This leads me to my second point about authenticity: It can only be had in Christ. C. S. Lewis wrote, “Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. . . . The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. You real, new self will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. . . . Christ will indeed give you a real personality.”

Lewis makes this statement as one who understands the deceptiveness and destructiveness of sin. Only God knows who we really are — that is, who he created each one of us to be. Sin leads us to construct alternative versions of ourselves, selves we prefer, selves that are more comfortable, selves that bring us the most glory. We may try to construct selves that will honor God, but even our best intentions will be perverted when working off a manmade blueprint.

In Christ, however, we become our true selves. God opens our eyes to our sins, to the self-deception, to the things in our lives that are not of him. Then he transforms us, conforming us to the only perfect human being who ever lived. In Christ, we stop operating according to the constraints of social expectations, personal insecurities, and lies. Rather than live in ways that are subhuman, we finally live in a manner worthy of God’s vision for humanity.

That is authenticity. It is a “human being fully alive” (Irenaeus). It is not built in a day, nor is it maintained easily. Like humility, realizing we are closer to it ensures that we will lose it. Yet the nature of authenticity is also good news. Because authenticity cannot be faked, because it does not, ironically, rest in our natural selves, our only option for being truly authentic people is to lose ourselves, casting ourselves on Christ’s mercy, joyfully acknowledging that Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness. The more we realize our desperate state and need of God’s grace, the more authentically human we will be.

My wise writer friend Dorcas wrote an article here that is both simple and profound. All of us can go round and round, wondering if we made right decision yesterday or last month, wondering how we should make the next decision, wondering What Is God’s Will.

Today’s decisions do make a difference for tomorrow, and we need to think about consequences. That’s part of wisdom. But being finite, we will go crazy trying to do all the mental gymnastics of “What if…”  God tells us to ask Him for wisdom because He knows we could never be big enough or wise enough to figure it out alone. My goal is to live so that His peace is the umpire, calls the shots, and I can make decisions based on whether He gives peace about it.

Until heaven,  no one can plumb the depths of the question about  God’s sovereignty vs. man’s free will. Meanwhile, His peace is perfect, and His wisdom is great. And His virtues are always the right thing to choose.

Maybe what we see as the big life decisions of career and education and location are actually the small ones. The big decisions are the ones that transcend every place and relationship and job — integrity and kindness, mercy and generosity, love and joy and justice.

–Dorcas Smucker