Being Authentic . . .

Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable.
Be honest and transparent anyway.

~ Mother Teresa

For all of you fashionistas (and those of you who are not) -- this is a REAL, authentic Louis Vuitton bag. It belongs to my mother-in-law, an unpretentious person who just wanted to buy the real thing with her own money and she did. As someone in her early sixties and un-retired, she still works hard on a daily basis as a medical transcriptionist and doesn't frivously spend her money. So it didn't seem odd to me that she purchased the bag; Mom spent a great deal of time thinking about it and living with the decision before she finally selected this one.

And the reason I took a photo of Jay holding it? To post in the store with the caption "THIS Is a REAL Louis Vuitton" to show my consignors who attempt to pass off a fake as real -- as if I've never held the true, authentic purse myself.

It's amazing how many people will bring me a faux purse, for example a Coach or Dooney bag, and attempt to convince me that it's really worth $300. "What do you mean you sold my real Coach for $20! I paid $400 for it!"

Come on. Get real. I see the "authentic-looking" registration inside that declares it was "Made in China." I see the glued edges of the lifelike "leather." Just this week a moderately good LV fake appeared in the store and I'm 99.99% sure someone paid over $100 for it. Upon closer examination I could detect the errors in workmanship, feel the inferior texture of the shell and ascertain that the hardware was just poorly-coated metal. It's further unfathomable that one of my consignors attempts to convince me she's paid over $700 for a real Louis Vuitton with no documentation, schlepped into the store in a tattered plastic Target bag to consign. A real Louis comes with a protective cover!

We're a lot like these women who want me believe they have the real thing when the handbag is an imposter. We spend hours convincing our friends that we're authentic -- the real thing -- when we're really fake. On the outside we might look like a $1000 Botega bag when we're actually the shoddy knock-off Birken. We might glitz it up like a Judith Lieber evening bag when we're nothing more than a dimestore bedazzled K-Mart bluelight special.

The lesson that Jay and I have been learning over the past few weeks of our Free journey at CR is this: it's always much better to be authentic like Mom's Louis Vuitton handbag. We are striving to be real people who connect to others in transparent, honest relationships without pretense and phoniness. We're not perfect -- far from it -- but we're discovering that our real friends accept us as we are, just as God unconditionally loves and accepts us. For too many years both of us worked hard at trying to measure up to what we thought others expected. All it made us was shoddy knock-offs of who we were meant to be. We'd rather be originals. Authentic. Determined not to pass ourselves off as anything less than what we truly are.

And it is incredibly freeing to live like that.