unedited version

It seems everywhere you look, our culture is longing for true community. This is from John Mayer's blog: "This is about us all. Every one of us. Who all seem to know deep down that it's incredibly hard to be alive and interact with the world around us but will try and cover it up at any cost. For as badass and unaffected as we try to come off, we're all just one sentence away from being brought to the edge of tears, if only it was worded right." He continues to say that he longs to be authentic and I think he incapsulates the human desire to be fully known.

Frederick Buechner in Telling Secrets says "the central paradox of our condition--that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are--even if we tell it only to ourselves--because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing."

The kind of community where we can truly be our "unedited" self should be found so profoundly in the community centered around the gospel of Christ. Unfortunately Christians can be really good cover-up artists. But if the gospel is true and we are all collectively worse off than we ever thought yet more accepted than we ever hoped to be because of Christ - we of all people ought to be the most authentic, free and unedited.