Not-so-everyday News

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Authenticity Quotes

Here are some quotes that stuck out to me from a recent Boundless article:

We long for reality, even fake reality.

One irony in our culture is that, for all of our praise for "spontaneity" and "radical free choice," we are remarkably conformist. In a way, we are conformist in practice (all wearing jeans) while being nonconformist in principles (believing widely contrary ideas about honesty). Yet we should be personally flexible but morally predictable. We should agree on important values and then apply them in wide-ranging, freedom-inspired ways.

Authenticity practices a gracious honesty, and it takes wisdom to know when is the best time to say the fullness of what we think and feel.

Authenticity doesn't mean we never act insincerely. This sounds rather odd, but "pretending" is, at times, essential, inevitable, and ethical. In Faking It, William Ian Miller acknowledges that although insincerity conjures up many negative connotations, "I am not a hypocrite ... for pretending to find interesting what is dull, ... [n]or am I a hypocrite for putting on a somber face at the news of the untimely death of a person I didn't especially care for."

"Let us pretend in order to make the pretense into a reality." ~C. S. Lewis~

Again doth life speed on apace!

Recently in the life and times of Rael:

• Returned to Abilene for my last semester as a senior English major
• Had a tea party on my bedroom floor with one creative mom and four lively kids
• Began 4 college classes (World Lit, American Lit, Shakespeare, and Lifetime Wellness)
• Watched LotR (the extended edition, of course, in 1-disk-per-morning/night installments) with S and Mrs. I.
• Began walking almost every morning on a darkening county road with neighbor ladies.
• Took a wild sunset ride on a four-wheeler (Mrs. I was driving, thank goodness!)

Whew! And that's just a bit of it. At the moment I'm sitting in the quiet English Department workroom; we student workers are allowed to do our own thing when there's no work to be done. After a while I'll head out to help with AWANA Cubbies.

Tonight is the first club meeting of this school year! How cheering it was last year to greet those shining, chubby (often mischief-inclined) little faces every week! Games are fun, and puppets, and story time, not to mention crafts and the all-important snack time! But to help them learn God's Word is the most priceless responsibility. I pray the words will come back to them later in life, as they do to me even now, so many years after being in AWANA myself.

Though perhaps they'll remember the references better than I. ;)