(Not) Overediting Your Existence
There should be a realness, a raw believability, to our personality and life. Most of us can sniff out a pretender or fake, at worst, an overedited or suppressed person, at best. One of the signs of an emotionally healthy and socially healthy person is they do not overedit their existence. There is a congruent freeflow from their inner world to their talk and behaviors.
You may be thinking, "Yes! How wonderful, to be real and transparent..." But I often hear Christians claim realness and transparency, yet actually are slick and selective about their realness. I call this red herring realness--showing just enough to seem real while continuing to hide the iceberg underneath the waterline. In nearly thirty years of ministry at the time of this writing, across multiple denominations, movements, and theological cultures, I can reliably say that most of the social dynamics in the body of Christ (in the West) tend to be superficial or overedited. There is a nagging and endless feeling of fakeness.
Why? Why do we try so hard to say and do the perfect thing, instead of the real thing and the free thing? Are we that desperate to be liked? Are we that rejection-sensitive? How did our existence become so edited? Why are we living out only 30% or 49% or 72% of our personality?
(Not) Overediting Your Existence
A full rainbow of answers to these questions would require at least a mini-book, so I want to provide simple guidance and a prophecy the Spirit is streaming into my consciousness.
Make a short list, no more than five items, of the parts of your personality that you continually push down or overedit. Take this list to the Lord in prayer and ask Him for two things: (1) minor and major opportunities to express those parts of you and (2) connections with people who love and reinforce, or at least respect and make room for, those parts of you. If you are serious and prayerful about being an unredacted existence--congruent and freeflowing across any and all situations--God will surprise you with specific, quick answers.
He created you in His image, which inherently means you have almost infinite potentiality for uniqueness. The problem is, we have become such love-me puppies with people addiction that we have designed a puppet personality, an "epi-personality", on top of our original one. The fake You must die and evaporate that the real You might live and live more abundantly in Christ.
What Realness is Not
A brief bit of wisdom on what realness is not.
Some people, again claiming realness and transparency, are actually loose cannons and loose bowels. Congruent freeflow from the inside out does not mean we ignore contextual variables. I would not confess a down day of burning lust to my Christian brother while his small kids are around listening. I would not share certain things from the pulpit that I would in a private small group setting. I would not confront an offense with cascades of emotion, but with a calmer heart and controlled honesty. Adapt your congruent freeflowing to contextual variables.