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Commentary

By Liz Quirin

The Journey of an Authentic Person

I had the great good fortune of seeing Bob recently, a man I hadn’t seen for about 15 years, a man of principle, of clearcut values, a man who has stood for justice for more years than I have known him. One of his employees said, “Isn’t he great? Isn’t he just unbelievable?” No, I said to the younger man. He’s just becoming more clearly the person he has always been, the person he was always meant to be.

Does that sound strange to you? It sounded a little bit odd to me, even as I said it, but the more I thought about it, the more I tend to stand behind what I said. We are constantly evolving as beings; we don’t stay the same from one year to the next, at least I hope we don’t. We should be constantly growing in wisdom and hopefully generosity and grace as we get older.

If we use our sad moments, our perplexing times, our hardest hours as times of stretching and reaching to God with our hearts and minds, we are, I believe, becoming our most authentic selves. We don’t reach the goal of becoming authentic unless we come face to face with adversity, are tested in the fires of ethical dilemmas and soul-searching loss. We determine what is most essential, most life-giving to ourselves and others and then act on that information.
To succeed and live life as an authentic person is deceptively simple and extremely complicated at the same time. You can only live authentically if you discover how you can apply God’s rules to your life, to do whatever you do to benefit others in small ways first, and those small ways will lead you to larger and more difficult ways as you mature and become more and more of yourself.

I’ve met a number of people like Bob over the years, some close to home, even in my own office. They aren’t wheedling naysayers in the face of what appear to be insurmountable obstacles. They, like Bob, wade in where the water is deepest, the “sharks” are thickest and just keep pushing to the farther shore, knowing that they are doing the best they can for God’s people, not worried about what others think or say, who will receive special awards or recognition for their work. They, like Bob, realize that if we all sit around waiting for the world to get better, so many good people who need just a little help, won’t get it.

So the deceptively simple plan that God has laid out for all of us, to help one another, to care for all — even those we don’t necessarily like — may be simple, but it certainly isn’t easy. In fact, it’s a plan that has to be followed for a lifetime to get it right, or at least to come close to getting it right.

My friend Bob is 74, and he’s still working on the original plan, becoming more and more authentic as he travels through his life. It’s not a conscious effort that he’s making; he may not even be aware of it although I’m sure he is. It was just nice to be able to see him at this stage of his “becoming” more of himself.