“What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in the faces that are not our own.”
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
Grad school and the podcast have exposed me to the words of men and women I may have never found. One such author is Parker Palmer. His pen has posed questions and content that my soul has wrestled and on many days lost. There is the incredible paradox of where I currently sit: a graduate student 20 years removed from the university where I turned the tassel on my undergraduate education. My hair has found the wisdom and struggles of years passed. My quiver, to borrow a biblical expression, more full than when I left. My struggle, much the same.
The quote above stung like a barrage of hornets whose hive had just been kicked. It has been a long time. It has been a long road. I have been a lot of people, most of them not me. I have tried on masks of preacher and teacher and mentors. I have covered myself in the perceptions of personalities that I thought would make me more successful, more likable, more happy. In all that striving, my cup of joy remained empty, my heart discontent.
Mr. Palmer, it can certainly take a long time to be who you have always been. It has been a long road. My skin now shows signs of the journey life has been. My eyes show the age of the decade of my forties, that have long since forgotten the youth of my twenties sitting in the same spaces of learning.
Yet, there is one difference. Today, I am who I am. Masks have been removed. Insecurity has been replaced by certainty, not of selfish ambition, of simply self. The striving of youth to fit my frame into the mold of men who never knew they were leaving shapes that I was trying to shift into has been shed to find myself. Each shape, each form was simply a placeholder for the true self I am today. Placeholders are the personalities, the personas, and performances we put on to be something that we think will be loved and accepted by others.
Those forms and shapes I have shed to become I am alive in Christ, hidden in his perfect blood, as the created and crafted individual of who he has called me to be. Not made in the image of any man, yet living in the image of creator.
To my friends, shed the shells of life you have lived. Peel back the masks you have hidden behind. Find yourself in the one who made you. Live you life, your calling, your vocation as the very person God has called you to be. Our success is not measured in numbers no matter the industry. Our success is found in this: did I live up to the calling given to me? Not someone else’s calling. Not someone else’s ministry. Not someone else mask to put on.
It is a long journey to become the person you always were. Yet, it is one always worth taking.
Be you! I will keep being me.
