Living More Authentic Lives

Do you ever wonder if you are the only one who struggles when life is hard? Do you look around and wonder if other people are screaming inside to lay down the mask of perfection and live more authentic lives just like you? 

Lately, I have felt a need for a pause. Grief and some unexpected adversities facing my family started to take a toll on this girl’s heart. It left me battling to press through fear of the unknowns and discouragement and make time to sit undistracted at my Master’s feet. 

I have been struggling, Y’All.

Sometimes, life is hard, or at least on my side of the wilderness. I could pretend otherwise and sugarcoat it a bit, but that is not my style. Honestly, that is partly what I have been struggling with the most. 

I have been thinking about how often, as Christians, we lack the honesty to present our hardships, struggles, and sufferings to the world. We all go through our things, but do we hide them away, afraid that if people see them, they might think differently about us? 

I have been looking around and noticed that almost everyone looks the same. We see AI-generated photos, our words edited with precision, and our FB and IG posts are dripping with perfection. Even Catherine, the Princess of Wales, recently fell prey to this temptation to always present a picture-perfect photo of her life to the world in the middle of recuperation from an illness.  Can’t we be honest and the world not shut down or go off on a tirade? 

We have developed this mindset that we are supposed to have it all together all the time. Every hair is supposed to be in place. We are supposed to be invariably strong and are almost paralyzed to think someone might find out otherwise.

Don’t we gloss over our hardships and struggles and put cheery, feel-good messages on them all in the name of encouragement?

I tend to disagree that this is what we are supposed to do as Christian influencers.  I am inclined to say aloud that we often have a tough time living out our own messages. 

In the middle of all our perfection, does our lives truly point to a need for grace and mercy to live out our more abundant lives? It may be time to fully admit that we never stop needing Jesus. Can I get an amen? 

Here is what I am going to dare say out loud today…

We ARE weak on our own. All of us. 

In our flesh, there is NOTHING good. (Romans 7:18)

We ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23) 

If we didn’t struggle at some point, we wouldn’t need Jesus. And I know I am not the only one who desperately needs Him. 

If we aren’t coming out of a battle, we will be going in right up until the day Jesus calls us home. There is no discharge in God’s army or checking spiritual warfare off our to-do list. God calls us to seasons of rest but never to be at ease. 

I’m not implying we stay in our sins or always struggle and have a hard time.  That is not what I am saying at all. 

But we will suffer in this world, and sometimes we’ll cry, fear, doubt, and even wrestle to understand and make sense of what God is doing along the way. 

I am taking comfort in knowing I am not the only one, and God must have thought it was important to be real and honest because He shone His spotlight all over our struggles in scripture so that it would lead us to Jesus. 

David hid in a cave when on the run from Saul. 

Elijah sat under a broom tree and wanted to die. 

Sarah laughed at God’s promise, finding it hard to believe. 

Naomi’s heart grew bitter and needed some reviving. 

Paul begged God three times to take his thorn away. 

Jeremiah threatened to never speak God’s message again. 

Peter flat-out denied He ever knew Jesus. 

Martha complained she didn’t have enough help and had difficulty sitting still. 

If some of these greats from the faith hall of fame wrestled and struggled, we will, too. They had a story to tell, and their weaknesses pointed to Jesus and the length, depth, breadth, and height of His great love for all of us. It showcased that we are never so far that He can’t see us, hear us, and reach us. 

Ephesians 3:17b-18 says this, “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” 

We are never a lost cause because of the power of God’s love to transform our lives from what isn’t to what is. 

God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. We find it most powerful at the end of ours – the days when we were too tired to move and put one foot in front of the other. The days we are low in our valleys and down in our messy pits. 

Maybe it is in showing our inconsistencies at the game called perfection that we see hints of God’s perfection and complete infallibility around our edges holding us together. 

If we never share our lows, will God ever truly get all the glory due to him? Will this world ever understand the depth of His great love for us if we never dare share how far He had to reach down to rescue us?

This lost and dying world needs to know that you can never be too far down that God can’t reach us and save us—not ever. Isn’t it time we allowed our stories to prove this to this already skeptical world?

We don’t always have to share all the gory details, but it may be time to share the struggle so we can genuinely share what restoration and redemption through grace and mercy look like. 

We may empower people to try again and not quit if we admit we have had to try again and pull through sometimes in our own lives when all we wanted to do was throw in the towel, too. 

Sometimes, the most encouraging and powerful thing you can do for someone else is to let them know you understand because you have been there, too. 

This messy world isn’t looking for help through carbon copies of perfection but from the people who have walked through some rugged terrain and near-death experiences and lived to tell the story of the nailed scarred hands that pulled them up and set them back on their feet. 

The cross was not pretty or glamorous.  It was ugly, messy, and bloody. 

Jesus died there to save us. 

I don’t think He would have bothered if we had it all together to begin with. 

We needed to be rescued from the depravity of sin so we could know just how far His love reaches to find us. And here is the clincher – we never stop needing to be saved.

God’s merciful arm reached way down for this girl. I may struggle occasionally,  but praise His name I know from where my help comes from.

I hope you do, too. 

No matter how much we wrestle and struggle, Jesus will always be our answer. 

Thank God forever for the Cross, the gift called redemption, and His continuous willingness to bend low to rescue.