Naked part 1
I've been thinking about this idea--not about naked people, calm down--for a while. Because I think it goes way past just not wearing clothes. I think nakedness is vulnerability. Openness. Honesty. I think it's about showing people who you are. And look at this: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed" (Genesis 2:25). That's the first time the word "naked" is used in the KJV, and it number 6174 in Strong's Hebrew Concordance. It means, "nude." Pretty plain and simple. There was nothing between husband and wife. No secrets. They were cleaved one to another. Holding nothing back from each other. And here's the most important part--here's the part that I'm going to focus on for the next few days--they were naked... and they were not ashamed. Now according to dictionary.com "ashamed" has three meanings. 1. feeling shame; distressed or embarrassed by feelings of guilt, foolishness, or disgrace. 2. unwilling or restrained because of fear of shame, ridicule, or disapproval. 3. bashful; timid. And, of course, those three definitions all kind of go together. If you're distressed or embarressed that kind of restrains you from doing things. It makes you feel bashful, or timid. But the thing of it is, it comes from judgment. Either from others or, more likely, from yourself. Can't nobody judge or condemn you like you can judge or condemn yourself. Because while other people might think they know what you've done... you were right there. Doing it. I think not being judged, or condemned, is a main goal for a lot of people. There aren't that many people out there who can say (and mean) "I don't really care what people think about me." That's a rare trait. Most people will do just about anything in order to get the response from people that they want. What's that old saying? "We buy things we don't need, with money we don't have, in order to impress people that don't matter." Something like that. My point is: We put so much effort and energy into displaying this false front--covering ourselves--because we're naked and ashamed. Even to the point where we'll hide the things we love because we don't want people to be able to tell us that we shouldn't love them. We don't want people to make fun of us. So we deny who we really are in order to fit into somone else's idea of who we're "supposed" to be. Instead of cleaving to each other and building strong, meaningful relationships we build social media "friendships" where even if we tell our deep, dark secrets, it's more or less to perfect strangers. People that aren't really in our lives enough to make a huge difference. Like we want that intimacy so badly, but also want to keep everybody at arm's length. That doesn't really work though. It can't. The people in our lives need to be IN our lives. And we need to be able to be real with them. Good, bad, and ugly. We need to be able to cleave to each other. To lean on each other. To stop putting on a false face and let people see us for who we really are. To be naked--vulnerable, true, honest, and intimate--and NOT ashamed!