So much of our lives are spent chasing after ourselves. One of the biggest errors of which is allowing the world to identify what finding ourselves should look like. And it would seem the criteria for found-ness is constantly changing, so that the search can really never end. It is so all of our lives will be spent on searching for ourselves, in self-discovery and personal revelations meant to bring hope and enlightenment. Of course, really it brings neither. Instead it fuels a never-ending hungry fire which actually consumes us the more we feed it. It is by the world's standards that "arrival" appears to be the ability to know one's self and to personally fill and express or purchase the life-style that would fulfill the essence of who we have come to know ourselves to be.
As we search, it actually would be best to search not within ourselves, but within each other. We find ourselves in the stories and lives of other people. We find their stories to be our stories and therefore we actually come home to ourselves in the lives of others. For it is within the relational process that God enters. In the investing of ourselves, we discover life, and in discovering life, we encounter God, and where we encounter God, we begin to find ourselves. So that a person who truly wanted to find themselves must not look in, but out. They should not search their own story, but enter into the stories of others.
It is a paradox in thinking.
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