What Does it Mean to be Known?

We had been talking for hours when the heart of our conversation finally became apparent. We were using the same words but not in the same way. She was upset and lonely, needing a friend to pour herself out to, and I was more than happy to sit with her. She kept telling me nobody “knew her,” and I thought I understood what she meant. I pressed into it, asking if she had trouble being vulnerable and letting people into her life. She didn’t.

Somehow our conversation kept looping back around to what she felt was her calling in ministry, and I realized it wasn’t really an issue of people not knowing her, but rather people not knowing of her.

In her mind, being known meant that others knew her name and her platform, not her sin patterns and her heartaches.

It took me weeks to process it enough to speak into her life, because it meant starting from a completely different place. This isn’t about you feeling like people know the depths, it’s about believing that unless the masses recognize your face, you aren’t known.

And I wonder if we have all gotten tangled up in the difference at some point; our mouths say, “I want live, deep life with people who accept my junk,” but with our hearts we cry, “My name is enough. The rest is too vulnerable and doesn’t pack a punch the way a sold-out event does.”

There are plenty of people who are satisfied with their likeness being known rather than their character, and they choose environments where this tendency is reinforced. We can spot them from the cheap seats, and they eventually turn into caricatures instead of shepherds.

It’s easy in this day and age to make the mistake of exchanging depth for exposure, but it’s costly and dangerous to do so. The scariest part is that more often than not, we actually feel like we are pursuing something noble; we are sharing the portion of our story that we’re comfortable with and calling it community.

We would rather hold a microphone and control the tone and volume then set it down and speak from the broken depths. The podium allows a version of vulnerability that satisfies us without necessarily exposing us, and it keeps us just far enough from the version of ourselves we would rather hide.

Some of us have deep friendships and places we do allow in, and not everyone has to be that to us. The problem comes when we make success our barometer for how well we are known. Truth be told, they aren’t even related.

Our striving for attention has often replaced our deep need for genuine relationship, and every now and then I think it’s a good question to ask ourselves.

What am I doing to make myself known?