What does it mean to be authentic? Some years ago a well-known American business magazine surveyed several thousand employees, asking those employees what they considered to be the most important attribute for a manager to have. The answer was authenticity. It begs the question as to what those employees considered the meaning of the word to be.
Without resorting to Google, many would perhaps say that being authentic simply means speaking one’s mind and not fudging one’s position about things. Go a little deeper and maybe it’s more about being truthful to oneself and being able to articulate what one truly feels. This brings with it another interesting question. How well do we know ourselves to be able to gauge how we truly feel about something? Let’s take an example. Someone may say that they don’t like going to another country on holiday. They may give lots of reasons, the heat, the language barrier, having to cope with airports, strange food, all expressed with conviction and all, apparently, being the authentic standpoint of the person concerned. What then if one digs deeper, only to find that this person hails from an unfortunately racist family, and then a little deeper again to discover that Dad was bullied at school by a group of immigrant kids. It was Dad’s trauma as a child that led to him being racist, which in turn is responsible for our friend not wanting to travel. To what degree does one need to know the circumstances supporting one’s stated view for that view to be authentic? Is the truly authentic person then one who no longer holds second-hand opinions, who recognises the effects in their lives of extraneous influences? Who has deep understanding of what makes them think, and respond the way they do? Who has received inner-healing to become the person God made them to be before life got in the way?
We think so. The more we know ourselves, the more authentic we can be and become. If we believe that God created us all with and for a purpose, then the closer we get to His original of us, the more fit for purpose we’ll be. Authenticity, we’d suggest, is our living and expressing ourselves in the certainty of knowing that we are truly the image of the Christ within us.