Authenticity: From “Me” to “Who?”

 

Children don’t know anything but transparency and authenticity. Their freedom to be themselves is quite compelling.  It is only later that they begin to adapt to the social pressures in this fallen world.

I remember in my wise four-year-old mind becoming aware that the thoughts coming in the form of ideas or conversation with others were actually coming from me.  I remember the awe I would feel when I would whisper to myself, “I am Me.”  Allowing the thought to reach into my very soul, I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own identity, and I marveled at this reality.

But when a child is slowly growing through those formative years, identity can become very confusing, and authenticity becomes less and less automatic.  Little by little I began to lose that ownership of my identity.  In the next half a dozen years, we moved. A lot!  We were always the new kids in the neighborhood, the new students in the classroom.  In one of my first grade classrooms (I think I went to three first grade class rooms in three different states that year) the teacher had given us the wonderful privilege of writing on the chalkboard during the lunch hour.

One noon, I had finished my lunch early and had taken my place beside another little girl who was writing on the chalk board.  I quietly drew some figures on the board, but out of the corner of my eye I was watching this very sophisticated little girl, this  One-who- belonged, write her name.  She not only knew how to write her name, she knew how to write it in cursive!  Surreptitiously I watched and, hiding my work behind my left hand, I wrote it just like she wrote it, Betty.  I went back to my desk that day and continued to practice that special word, Betty.  Throughout my school years and into adult hood, any time I doodled, in the midst of the doodling one word was sure to appear. . . Betty.  In some ways, this was to mirror the loss of that sense of identity that I had grasped so innocently in my preschool years.  I did not consciously adopt someone else’s identity, but I became less and less sure of who was existing at my core, who God had intended me to be.

One thing remained constant, though, in my growing years.  The God who lived up there in those beautiful skies, grew to be my companion.  In so many ways He showed me His beauty, His kindness, His creativity, His protection.  However, He spoke to me most clearly through His creatures. They became His sketch book of every day lessons.  “Look dear child at the beauty of the many colors in that rooster’s tail.  Watch the tenderness with which that momma cow licks and washes her tiny calf; see the devoted look in those beautiful cocker eyes of your faithful dog Winky as she watches to see what you will do next.”  In each creature, I saw characteristics that had been placed by a loving Creator.  But there was more! Each creature seemed to be secure in who/what it was.  God had created it to be a dog, a cow, a horse, a sheep, and it found satisfaction in being, just in being.  True authenticity!  I have watched those creatures almost in awe.  They are content, unassuming, and real!  None of the socialization, none of the pressure that we as humans have experienced in order to fit in, to pretend, to perform.

My natural instinct has been, even as a child, to turn to those creatures that also seemed to accept me just as I was.  At the age of four, I would slip out to the dairy barn after the cows had been milked and had  settled for the night.  In that long old barn, I had birthday parties; I had prayer meetings.  With a little grain in my hand, I would walk from stanchion to stanchion, preaching, singing, and entertaining.  And they accepted me.  They were my adoring audience. I could be free to be me.  Later, after we moved from the dairy farm and began the saga of continual moving, my cocker spaniel, Winkie, was the receptor of my tales of longing, my companion on walks, and my nighttime buddy.  She loved me unabashedly and uncompromisingly.

By my teenage years, I was becoming more and more a creator of my own self.  With deep feelings of not belonging in this world, of watching it as an outsider, I was becoming a young adult.  Unlike that little four year old who was thrilled with the “me-ness of me,” the person I was becoming did not like the me I was.  I did not like the body I had been given, nor did I not like my history.  Instead of accepting my identity, I became adept at covering it, of masquerading it, of working hard to become what I thought I should be.

 

Praise The Lord, the Drought is Over!

Welcome to the barn
Welcome to the barn

We were in the final day of our first Spiritual Dynamics Conference. Donald Mostrom, author from New England, had come to share his life with us.   We were soaked by  a sudden downpour as we approached  the barn where we had set up old desk chairs, a podium,  a small sound system   scrounged from friends.   It had been raining and now it was pouring rain.  I was quite discouraged as I walked with our guest who was ready to deliver his last message of the weekend. However, Dr. Mostrom was exhilarated.  “Praise the Lord,” he shouted as we walked up the hill to the barn that Sunday morning, “the drought is over!!!!”   I looked at him in disbelief, but also relief.

Forty to sixty guests had come to spend the weekend.  Some had stayed in town, others at the farm in tents or in the granary where, after sweeping and hosing it down, we had set up cots.   Dr. Mostrom, had the privilege of sleeping in the farmhouse in Sara’s bedroom while she bedded on the floor of our bedroom.

After all our careful planning and preparation for this conference, it had rained the whole weekend. We had planned some exciting and fun times, such as a trail hike, Frisbee golf in the pasture, a volley ball game in the front yard. But for most of the weekend we huddled in the barn.

We also were limited in what we could do in the barn.  At this point in our history, there was no kitchen in the barn, so we supplied all of the meals from the farmhouse kitchen.  The young families who attended the conference had small children, and we had carefully planned child care for them in the living room of the farm-house.  The bathroom in the basement served as the main bathroom for the conference.  In fact, the entire tiny house had become an extension of the conference.

By Saturday morning, we were almost wading in mud in the kitchen, mud that was dragged in by all of the necessary traffic.  By noon of the second day the basement had flooded.  From the bottom of the steps to the bathroom, we had set up an improvised “bridge” created from an old wooden ironing board that had been stored in the basement. (Creativity flourishes when there are few alternatives.)   The living room nursery was cluttered and dirty, but dry.

Don Mostrom, the author of Intimacy with God (1983), had been invited to be our first guest speaker for several reasons.  Our first year together we had studied The Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal by Richard Lovelace.  We were challenged.  As we read Lovelace’s acknowledgments, we discovered that a certain man, Don Mostrom,  had been one of Lovelace’s primary mentors.  After the Bascom family traveled to New England to attend a Peniel  Bible Conference, they came back renewed, refreshed, and desiring to hear more from Don Mostrom who had been the key-note speaker. We were thrilled when this man from the East Coast agreed to come to our poor, humble farm to join us for a weekend and share his thoughts from a book that he was working on at the time, Spiritual Privileges You Didn’t Know Were Yours.

We were deluged that weekend, but not only with rain.  We had found joy in working together as a young community. We had studied together, planned together, and were now working out the individual gifts of each member.  From cooking to nursery, from creating song sheets to leading the singing, from registration to clean-up, we each used our gifts.  Our children had been assigned their own important tasks:  Derrick was to park cars, Dan and Derrick created the Frisbee golf course and blazed the trails for hiking; Sara at seven years old was appointed “the chief smiler”which she did with  total sincerity. And together, our community had been sitting at the feet of a spiritual giant as he challenged us and encouraged us with spiritual blessings from God’s heart.

It is not always in the physical comfort of our surroundings that we find the presence of God.  He was there as we waded to the bathroom, as we mopped the muddy kitchen floor, as we sat huddled in the barn instead of doing all of the fun activities we had planned.  Grace and abundant joy in the presence of the others who had gathered with us.  This was an unwrapping of his presence in community. Yes, in the midst of the mundane the sun was shining.  Thus, the exclamation “Praise the Lord, the drought is over,” was the capstone that crowned our weekend.

The Chief Smiler
The Chief Smiler
Don Mostrom "driving the bus" in a Down on the Farm fun night.
Don Mostrom “driving the bus” in a Down on the Farm fun night.